Not Having an Opinion is OK

Rumaan Alam talks about what he terms the “firehose of certainty”:

“Everyone on Twitter—everyone on the Internet—seems so damn certain.”

That led him to wonder:

“Is deciding what you like an instinct, a sense that arrives as swiftly as my autoimmune response to cat dander? Or is it the result of reasoned consideration, the way wine tasters swish pinot noir around in their mouths, spit it out, and reach for complex metaphors about chocolate and tobacco?”

Alam himself can’t always make up his mind. That characteristic sticks out like a sore thumb on the Internet:

“I am surrounded by confidence and all I feel is ambivalence. I am so cowed by how everyone else seems to know their own mind that it’s hard for me to exercise my own.”

I think Alam need not worry. After all, isn’t Arthur Schopenhauer right when he wrote this on why just reading isn’t enough unless one reflects as well:

“When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. It is the same as the pupil, in learning to write, following with his pen the lines that have been pencilled by the teacher. Accordingly, in reading, the work of thinking is, for the greater part, done for us…it is only by reflection that one can assimilate what one has read.”

The Internet’s certainties are mostly just what Schopenhauer said: a repetition of someone else’s mental process.

Alam would possibly be inspired by Maria Popova wrote:

“Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind…We live in a culture where one of the greatest social disgraces is not having an opinion, so we often form our "opinions" based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas of others, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates. We then go around asserting these donned opinions and clinging to them as anchors to our own reality. It's enormously disorienting to simply say, "I don't know." But it's infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right – even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself.”