Opinion, without purpose
Every man and his dog seems to have one... but what's the point?
Humans evolved to maintain group norms and cohesion. Judgement once served a function: to identify threats, enforce boundaries, and ensure survival. But what was once a necessity has now expanded far beyond its original scope. Opinions today manifests as an unending commentary on trivialities. There is a difference between necessary judgement (on matters of survival, ethics, consequence etc.) and ambient judgement (concerning taste, preference, and harmless behaviours).
Instead of being responses to necessity, many opinions are now merely attempts to regulate discomfort. A performance that serves only to signal identity, and to attempt to stabilise oneself against difference, desperately reassuring yourself that you are safely “right”.
But really, most opinions have no consequence. They do not improve outcomes, nor do they deepen understanding, yet we continue to act as though the world requires our input. We treat having an opinion as some sort of participation, when in reality it is nothing more than an indistinct noise from the sidelines of reality. If an opinion offers any function, it is usually only as a pacifier for our own narcissism. (Surely by now you can see the irony of this very article, yes?)
When there are so many diverse stimuli on offer, emotional investment is frequently misallocated to things that do not warrant it. We love and hate with surprising intensity over matters that neither require nor reward such engagement. The question is not whether something is good or bad, but why we feel compelled to decide on it at all.
“[Who] is in the position to determine which artist’s creations are a genuine act of love?” — Benjamin Court, Racialising Amateurism: Punk and Rap
Further, the authority implied in offering an opinion is rarely challenged - we just assume the right to evaluate without establishing any real need. What benefit do you receive from saying “I hate tango”, or “Taylor Swift is boring”? Does it improve anything, or anybody?
Opinions regulate internal dissonance, not external reality. Critique of others is often a displacement of unease, where we attempt to resolve something unsettled within ourselves by projecting it outward. In this sense, opinion becomes a substitute for more difficult forms of engagement. It allows one to opt out of thinking, listening, looking, and considering. To form an opinion, and use it as a lazy means of categorisation, is easier than to remain with uncertainty.
The challenge, then, is not to have better opinions, but to need fewer of them. Opinion has become a low-effort method of categorisation, where we can quickly sort our experience into manageable parts, often by primitive binary labels (like “good” and “shit”, or “love” and “hate”). But any efficiency in this system is only superficial. Real maturity lies in the ability not to express every thought. Silence is not ignorance, rather it is a sign of clarity, restraint, and prioritisation.
There are, of course, moments when opinion is necessary. Judgement remains essential in matters of consequence. But if opinions are to be useful, they must justify themselves. Those that serve no purpose should be discarded.
What remains instead is a life filled with observation, curiosity and disinterest, bordering in indifference in the healthiest way. The world is less adversarial, and less insistently categorised and compartmentalised. You do not need to continually classify everything, and you certainly do not need to use primitive, often baseless, opinions as a convenient means of doing so. Think more carefully about where your attention goes. The world does not improve with your judgement.
Further reading
This article was provoked by an episode of RJ Starr’s podcast The Psychology of Us, exploring the psychological structures that organise human experience.
More broadly, I renewed my interest in this kind of arts-psychology intersection recently after encountering an article on Amateurism by Julia Bryan-Wilson and Benjamin Piekut.
The images featured in this article are a triptych from an experiment in light, time and patience.