On having opinions
For a long time, I didn’t hold opinions in very high esteem. Given how abundant they are I figured they were easy to come up with. You just point at something and say, “this is good” or “this is bad”. I felt that chronic opinion having was a way of thinking that discouraged careful attention, as opinion havers seem to have already made their minds up about something before really looking at it. I tried to cultivate in myself and my writing an approach to the world based less on opinion and more on observation and description. The question was not, is this thing good or bad, but what am I really seeing when I look at this? To describe the world as I see it, I felt, would give me access to things as they are, instead of beginning with an idea of how things should be and then getting angry when they don’t meet that expectation, or feeling vindicated when they do.
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But recently I’ve changed my mind, or at least I think I have. I’m still not sure. I think that now I don’t think it is so easy to have opinions, at least it isn’t for me, because when I say “this is good” or “this is bad” I have not only classified something in the world but also exposed something about myself—I have become the type of person who does or doesn’t like that thing. I don’t want to commit to an opinion because I don’t want to commit to being a type of person. I don’t want to leave a record of my opinions because when they inevitably show themselves to be wrong, that would, in some way, make me wrong, too.
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But this past week I decided to experiment with opinion having. I developed several exercises that could help me become more adept at formulating opinions rapidly and with less self-consciousness, and then post them on Twitter. The first idea I had was to formulate extremely strongly held opinions about incredibly trivial matters, and to write the opinions in a grandiose, self-serious voice. I began with an opinion about puffer jackets that went as follows: “What has our culture lost by embracing the puffer jacket? The art of getting dressed. This shell, worn like armor for six months of the year, protects us from wind and rain, but also from the creative struggle involved in developing a personal style.”
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I tweeted this and an unexpected thing happened. Usually, my tweets get 5 likes on average, with the occasional tweet getting something like 25. This tweet received 125 likes and 13 retweets. People commented underneath saying things such as: “true” or “I agree” or “oh my god can everyone please shut the fuck up about puffer jackets.” This reaction was perplexing and encouraging. Perplexing because I thought I didn’t really care about people wearing puffer jackets, but then, with this feedback, I started to believe that maybe I did. And encouraging because I felt I had come upon a formula for generating not only an opinion, but popular tweets. (Is this why people have opinions all the time? Because they are popular? Because they are social? Because this is how people come to know you and you come to know yourself?)
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Obviously, I tried the format again, this time tweeting a strongly held opinion about an Australian burger franchise called Grill’d that was very popular and somewhat “trendy” in the mid-2000s, but has since become less “trendy”, though remains popular, I think. I tweeted: “Surely the clearest extrusion of Silicon Valley culture in Australia was Grill'd. Notice the juvenile abbreviated name? And the tagline, "the healthy burger". It employs the cultural logic of the TED Talk—a scam promising the impossible while complicating a most simple pleasure”. This tweet got only three likes. A friend messaged me about my Grill’d tweet. “I BELIEVE BURGERS can be healthy,” they wrote. “But maybe they put a chip in my brain. I worked there when I was 17.” I felt bad. I actually quite like Grill’d burgers. And I need a new puffer jacket. Does anyone have any recommendations?
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