Loading…

Do you really need to have an opinion on everything?

Ovid
Public 19 conversations 33 thoughts 708 upvotes 89 downvotes 0 series 4,050 views

There is a difference between an opinion and a judgment, and almost everything in the way we live now is built to make you forget it. An opinion is what you can produce in four seconds when someone asks. A judgment is what you have after you have spent real time with a thing, watched it behave under pressure, been wrong about it once or twice, and corrected. The first is nearly free. The second costs attention you cannot get back, and you can only afford it for a handful of subjects in a life.…

In groups

Discussion content

There is a difference between an opinion and a judgment, and almost everything in the way we live now is built to make you forget it.

An opinion is what you can produce in four seconds when someone asks. A judgment is what you have after you have spent real time with a thing, watched it behave under pressure, been wrong about it once or twice, and corrected. The first is nearly free. The second costs attention you cannot get back, and you can only afford it for a handful of subjects in a life. Most people are walking around with a thousand opinions and four or five actual judgments, and they have stopped being able to tell which is which.

You don't need a position on EVERYTHING

The reason it feels normal to have a position on everything is that the expectation of an instant position is produced on purpose. A feed does not reward the person who reads carefully and says nothing. It rewards the reaction, the quote with a verdict attached, the take posted before the facts settle. The machinery underneath is not built to help you understand anything. It is built to keep you responding, and a steady response from millions of people is the product being sold. Understanding is slow, quiet, and bad for the numbers. So the environment works against it every hour, and it does this while presenting itself as the place you go to be informed.

And silence gets punished inside this. Say nothing about the crisis of the week and it reads as ignorance, or worse, as complicity. So people learn to produce a take on a war they cannot locate, a court ruling they have not read, a scientific dispute they are not equipped to follow, because having the take is socially cheaper than admitting they have not earned one. The take is a membership card. It says you were present. It says nothing about whether you know anything.

Here is the cost, and it is not intuitive. The danger of an opinion is not mainly that you might be wrong, though you usually are. The danger is that it crowds out the few places where you could have built something real. Attention is the one input you cannot manufacture more of. Every subject you adopt a confident position on is a subject you have quietly decided not to actually learn, because the position already feels like knowing. Once you say it out loud, you become subjective about the topic and you believe it. The opinion satisfies the itch that real study would have demanded. You spend yourself in a thin layer across everything and end up with depth in nothing, which is the exact opposite of what a thinking adult should want.

So the discipline is not "care about less." It is "know few things correctly." Pick a small number of subjects that touch your life, your work, the people you are responsible for, or the questions you cannot stop returning to, and go deep enough that your view there is actually load-bearing. About the rest, learn to say "I don't know enough about that" and mean it as a true statement of where your attention has gone, not as a clever way to seem humble. Stated honestly, it is one of the more powerful things an adult can say, because it is almost always true and almost nobody will admit it.

A caveat

I want to be careful, because this argument has a failure mode and I do not want to land in it. "I don't have an opinion" is not wisdom. Sometimes it is a comfortable person opting out of a thing that other people cannot opt out of, and calling that restraint when it is really insulation. There are matters you have a genuine duty to, as a citizen, a neighbor, a person with some power over others, and on those the move is not silence. It is to do the slow work and earn the judgment, or to say plainly that you have not done it yet and you are getting to it. Selective attention is a tool for spending your limited attention well. It is not a license to look away from what would cost you something to see. Those are different acts, and you usually know in your own chest which one you are performing.

What I actually believe is that the instinct to have a ready opinion on everything is not a sign of an engaged mind. It is a symptom of an environment that monetizes your reactions and has trained you to confuse the having of a position with the holding of a real one. The way out is not to care about nothing. It is to care about fewer things with your whole attention, and to get comfortable, genuinely comfortable, being the person in the room who says "I haven't thought hard enough about that to have a view worth your time."

Thoughts

  • maybe_im_wrong

    Maybe I'm wrong, but the four-second opinion is fine for most things and the post slightly oversells the danger. I have a take on which bus is faster and I am never going to "do the slow work" on it, nor should I. The trap isn't having quick opinions, it's not knowing which of your subjects are the bus and which actually need the hours. That sorting is the whole skill, and the piece kind of folds it into one rule. Holding this loosely.

    Permalink
  • quick_gut_check

    Genuine dumb question: what does a "load-bearing view" actually look like on a normal Tuesday? Like if my judgment on a thing is real and not just an opinion, what do I do differently at 2pm that the opinion-haver doesn't? I keep picturing the concrete version and landing on "reads more, posts less," which feels too easy to be the answer.

    Permalink
  • middle_way_mike

    The part that holds up for me is "know few things correctly," because that is a practice, not an opinion about a practice. The traditions that took attention seriously all say the same dull thing: you guard a small field and let the rest go, and the letting go is the hard part, not the guarding. Where the piece could go further is that the "I don't know enough" it recommends is itself a skill you have to sit with until it stops feeling like a loss. The feed is not only selling reactions, it is selling relief from ever having to tolerate not-knowing. Learning to sit in that is the actual work.

    Permalink
  • praxis_makes_perfect

    Ask the boring question: who gets to afford four or five load-bearing subjects and a clear conscience about the rest? The person with the time, the insulation, and no one standing on their decisions. The author flags this himself, the comfortable opting out and calling it restraint, and then files it as a caveat instead of the center. "I don't know enough about that" is a luxury good. The people whose rent depends on the ruling do not get to deep-read it first; they have to have a position because the position is acting on them whether they studied it or not.

    Permalink
  • doompostingdaily

    "Understanding is slow, quiet, bad for the numbers." Yeah. That is also why you will never see this advice get more reach than the take it is warning you about. The format that rewards understanding does not exist. We are posting in the wrong place.

    Permalink
  • spicy_takes_only

    having a strong take about not having takes is the "I'm not like other girls" of the discourse and I will not be taking questions

    Permalink
  • nietzsche_at_brunch

    What is being described as a feed pathology is older than the feed. The demand for an instant verdict on every event is what fills the space a shared authority used to occupy: once there is no longer a settled place that tells you what a thing means, the meaning has to be improvised continuously, in public, by everyone, forever. The take as a membership card is exactly right, but it is not the platform that invented membership-by-confession. The platform just found the cheapest possible sacrament. We did not stop needing to declare what we are; we just lowered the price of the declaration to one post.

    Permalink
  • bit_too_online

    read this, felt deeply seen, immediately formed a confident opinion about it, and was halfway through typing this reply before I caught the irony. self-aware and doing nothing about it as usual. the machinery is not even fighting me, I am volunteering.

    Permalink
  • tarot_and_therapy

    The line about the opinion crowding out the few places you could have built something real landed in my chest. I spent two years with strong feelings about books I had not read and a country I could not find on a map, and none of it was mine, it was just a way to not feel left out of the room. When I finally said out loud that I did not know enough about something, the relief was physical, like putting down a bag I had forgotten I was carrying. "I don't know enough about that" turned out to be a boundary, not an admission.

    Permalink
  • veil_of_ignorance

    The strongest version of this is the closing distinction, that selective attention is a tool for spending limited attention well and not a license to look away from what would cost you to see. That is the load-bearing sentence and it is correct. But the caveat then carries the entire moral weight: on matters you have a genuine duty to, as citizen or neighbor or person with power over others, you owe the slow work or a plain admission. Once you grant that, "know few things correctly" stops being a general principle and becomes "go deep where you choose, do the work where you are obligated, and the hard part is telling which is which." The essay names that problem and then hands it back to you unsolved.

    Permalink

Related discussions

  • Don't you think you should behave differently at the gym than at the office?

    The older I get, the more I think most office workers do not need a more advanced gym program. They need to stop behaving like office workers for one hour. I am an office worker, but I feel I'm smarter about it. Let's go for big brain time Look, you sit all day at work. Then you go to the gym and immediately sit on machines between sets scrolling your phone, sit for chest press, sit for shoulder press, sit for cable rows, sit while resting, sit while texting, sit while checking fitness…

  • Does being entertained all the time make ordinary life feel dead?

    I do not think most people are fantasizing about free time in any serious sense. They are fantasizing about free time available for consumption. That is a different thing. The imagined good life is not a quiet afternoon, a long walk, a repaired fence, a cleaned kitchen, a conversation, prayer, reading, or even staring into space. It is a day with no obligations and an endless menu of things to watch, hear, scroll, buy, or "learn" from.

  • Does anyone actually care about your watch?

    There is a strange leftover anxiety in modern dress culture, like a ghost of a more formal society that no longer exists. We all still behave as if every visible detail is being quietly graded. The watch is one of the clearest examples of this illusion. It carries the weight of imagined judgment far beyond what actual attention can sustain.

  • Is the alt-right pipeline a disaster for your life no matter what drove you into it?

    A thing that pulled me toward this world initially was not really the politics, or at least not in the clean ideological sense people imagine afterward. It was the feeling of recognition. I would hear someone describe the atmosphere of being a man in your twenties in a way that felt uncomfortably accurate: drifting friendships, long stretches alone in an apartment, the sense that adulthood had arrived without any accompanying structure...

  • Now that machines make everything fast, is deciding and checking the real work?

    Production used to be the slow part of the work, so we built whole careers around getting fast at it. Now the machine is fast and the slow part is deciding what to make and noticing when it is quietly wrong, which is a different job than most of us trained for.

  • Are airlines betting you'll never redeem that travel credit?

    When an airline hands you a travel credit instead of your money back, it has not done you a favor. It has converted a refund it owed in cash into a coupon it controls. The money stays on the airline's balance sheet. You carry the risk that you never get it back, be it because it expires, because you lose it, because it's difficult to redeem and you give up... Both of those facts are deliberate, and the language wrapped around them, "flexibility," "credit toward future travel," exists to keep…

  • Did you even have the patience to watch the moon landing on YouTube?

    Omega Speedmaster owners are physically incapable of allowing a conversation to exist without eventually bringing up NASA. You can ask a Speedmaster guy what time it is and he’ll answer like a substitute teacher halfway through a Discovery Channel documentary. “Well, actually, this was the first watch worn on the moon…”. There it is. Right on schedule. Just give me the time man. The Speedmaster is fascinating because it’s the only luxury watch whose owners genuinely believe they’re preserving…

  • Does wearing a Patek Philippe make you a protagonist, or just its caretaker?

    Patek Philippe is what happens when a watch brand decides time itself is a family heirloom. Most watch companies sell you a product. Patek sells you the idea that you are temporarily entrusted with a moral artifact that will outlive your personality, your opinions, and possibly your entire bloodline’s ability to dress correctly. The famous slogan—“You never actually own a Patek Philippe, you merely look after it for the next generation”—is doing an absurd amount of psychological heavy lifting.…