Opinions

     I’ve been Blogging regularly for a little over a month now, and I was trying to come up with something for my next post when something began to bother me. 

     I live on the internet. Many, many people have written articles telling me and people like me that we should not do this, and that if we do live on the internet, we should log off and spend time outdoors or with our family. At least they did before 2020, and presumably once the pandemic is over, they’ll resume telling us that our homebound ways are shortening our lifespans and limiting our perspectives, making us poorer members of society. Evidently, they didn’t think that the entire point of our lifestyle was to avoid being members of society.  In spite of what people I don’t know and will probably never meet think of what I do all day, I do it, mostly because I’ve done it for years and it feels comfortable and safe.

     What I mostly do is look at other people’s opinion on things, mostly things I’ve never watched, read, or played. This is because whenever I look for opinions, I look for people who I’ve heard give decent opinions in the past, regardless of if I know what their talking about or not. I think the best opinions can be applied not just to one thing, but to a lot of things. If you have an opinion about a book, you likely have opinions about literature in general, and those opinions are going to be fairly consistent. So if you look for a large number of opinions on a lot of different books, that tells you a lot about what people want in literature. I don’t even think you need to be an “expert” to do this. Experts gain that label because they mostly read what society considers to be great literature. Most people don’t read great literature. They read books that are fun. So, if you look at what people like and what they say about what they like, that will tell you a lot about what people expect and how, if you were to create something in that medium, how to subvert that expectation.

     One opinion I see occasionally is that people shouldn’t talk if they have nothing to say. This is a good idea in theory. If you don’t have anything to say, then why are you going on about it? Shouldn’t you keep quiet and let the people with more to say have the floor? But let me tell you what hearing this said can do to a person.

     I run a one-person blog. At the moment, it has no followers and over its lifetime has had ninety views among about 77 published posts. It’s a mediocre blog that nobody cares about, I know it, everyone who reads it probably knows it, and I write material that fits that mold. I don’t have the best opinions because I don’t need to have the best opinions. Yet when I’m writing, I find myself asking, “What if this is a stupid opinion? What if people don’t think it’s interesting?” And that line of thinking makes me pause. 

     I try to avoid hurting people. I don’t have much of a filter, and I’m not good at reading non-verbal cues, but I put in as much effort as possible to avoid hurting people because it’s not their fault I don’t have any social skills, and even if I don’t have any friends, I don’t want to be the person who ruined someone’s life because I wasn’t thinking. Maybe it’s just because I’ve never found social skills easy, but I think we need to normalize the idea that someday, you’re going to hurt someone’s feelings. You may not realize it, but if someone tells you that you did something wrong, don’t make a big deal out of it. Apologize and move on, not every social pairing was destined to be. People who hurt others aren’t necessarily bad, it’s only if they hurt people constantly and without remorse that it becomes a problem. 

     The thing about telling people who “Have nothing to say” that they should keep quiet, or saying some variant of that, is that only works on people who have decent social skills, people who have a good instinctive sense of when they should say something and when they should keep quiet. Most people either have that or can develop it, but there are a lot of people who can’t. Should these people be expected to keep their mouth shut all the time, because they’re never sure if something they want to say is worth saying?

      In my eyes, the end result of telling people to keep quiet unless they have something to say is that already quiet people end up saying nothing at all and those who are prone to saying things that aren’t relevant to conversation will have more room to hog the conversation. No quiet person is going to want to say something that makes them look stupid, no person without a filter will care. It accomplishes the opposite of what they set out to do. 

    I think that we should be encouraging people to talk about their feelings from a young age. If they say something hurtful, we take them aside, tell them what they did wrong, show them how to apologize for their transgressions, and move on unless we see them making the same or a similar mistake. Not everyone learns social skills at the same rate, but one thing that’s more or less true for everyone is that until they cross a social line, they won’t know it’s there. Its why little kids are known for saying dumb or rude things, they haven’t learned where the lines are yet. And in a world where we are interacting with new people constantly, we always run the risk of crossing that line and hurting someone’s feelings without meaning to. It’s why I think we need to get together and agree on what the basic social rules are in a forum where everyone can have input, that way people who are prone to making mistakes will be able to avoid messing up, and when people get in a fight, they have a good metric to find out who’s right and who’s wrong. 

     I might not feel this way if I wasn’t very prone to messing up and didn’t have a massive fear of making someone angry because I didn’t think before I spoke. I have firsthand experience with what can happen when you don’t know what the rules are. I agree that we should avoid hurting others, but I think we forget just how easy it is to do that without meaning to, and under current social rules people who are prone to hurting others are told to just keep quiet, even if they would be better off saying things and just apologizing when making mistakes, so they can learn how to function in society. The goal of society is to be a place where we can express ourselves without fear of punishment or ridicule, but a lot of rules make it so that people with certain restrictions never get that choice. And the people making these rules aren’t cruel or petty, they’re just not thinking of those who get affected by this because they aren’t a part of that group. That’s just not right. Every single big issue in this world started as someone who was upset about something, someone who was told that they’re problem wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t until they saw that other people were dealing with similar problems that they realized that maybe they had a point. We know that racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism are big issues because people complain about them constantly. Does that mean they are the only big issues we’re facing? Or are they just the big issues people are willing to complain about?