I’m Tired of Your Opinions

I’m tired of your opinions.

I’m tired of your opinions about COVID. I’m tired of your opinions about the election. I’m tired of your opinions about the school openings and Black Lives and the Middle East and climate change. I’m tired of your opinions on the supreme court and birth control and diet culture and TikTok. 

Just. Stop.

I have no problem with opinions in and of themselves; it’s human nature to draw a conclusion about your own experience. But somewhere in there, people started presenting their opinions as fact: indisputable, air-tight, absolute. The very opposite of what an opinion is. 

The problem is that once I’ve converted my opinion into a fact, any other opinion is inherently wrong. So now it’s my job, as the Keeper of the Truth, to bestow my wisdom upon humanity until you see the error of your ways. (Listen, I’m just doing you a favor.) If, after some gentle cajoling and light character defamation, you still don’t join my team, I will scream at you in all caps. 

And this, folks, is the death of respectful discourse. This is why we now live in the age of social media dogfights and presidential screaming matches. This is why one unpopular opinion can lead to a person’s life getting cancelled. To me, this is more terrifying than any of the other fires (literal and metaphorical) burning out there right now. 

When did we become so sure of everything? The pandemic is clear evidence that nothing is certain. No one knows anything except for maybe like five people, and they’re all in a lab in Sweden right now, trying to confirm if what they know is right. So, technically, they don’t know, either.

I think this is why we cling so hard to our opinions: because we know we don’t know, and it scares us to death. I think we’d rather spend our days shuttling dirt to build hills we can die on instead of admitting that we have no fucking clue. 

Frankly, I don’t have time for that shit. I’m too busy trying to survive the apocalypse. 

I have plenty of opinions about lots of things, but not one of them is going to save me from the bleak truth that 99% of life is beyond my control and there’s nothing I can do but roll with it. Convincing you to think like me is just my adorable effort to make the world look how I think it should. And guess what? I could convince every one of you that what I think is true, and a pandemic or a tsunami or a hurricane or a return of early 2000’s fashion can still come and ruin everything.

The point is, we’re all scared. Every single one of us. We’re scared because we’re living in an absurd science fiction political comedy and we don’t know what’s going to happen or when it will end or what we’re supposed to do. We didn’t get a script, so we’re trying to write our own – louder than the one everyone else is writing.

But what if, instead of beating you with my opinion, I just told you the truth? 

I’m scared. I’m lonely. I need help.

Maybe I might not have to do it alone. 

But that’s just my opinion.