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My Opinion is... [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-01-27

When I first met my wife, we spent hours and hours talking. We didn’t just skim the surface; we dug deep, getting to know each other’s thoughts, feelings, and opinions. It was a time before the Internet and Social Media, when conversations unfolded naturally, without the pressure of instant updates, sad faced emojis and outside noise. We took the time to slowly discover who we were and what we valued most in life. Over time, it became clear that our values aligned, and we were a good fit for each other. Now, 35 years later, we’re still happily married, and together we’ve raised two remarkable young men who reflect the morals and values we hold dear.

Back then I didn’t know everyone’s opinion because opinions stayed where they belonged—close to home, shared only in conversations that mattered, with people who mattered. Opinions weren’t performances. They weren’t packaged for public consumption, slapped with hashtags, or filtered through the warped lens of likes and shares.

Nowadays, it feels like the currency of our world isn’t wisdom or even knowledge—it’s opinion. And the louder, more provocative, or more outrageous the opinion, the more value it seems to hold in our digital “click based” marketplace. But here’s the kicker: the more opinions we see, the less value each one holds. It’s just noise. White noise. And we’re all yelling to be heard over it.

This constant barrage of opinions has a cost. It robs us of nuance. It makes us quick to judge and slow to listen. It reduces people to soundbites and hot takes. And worst of all, it creates the illusion that we really know people when, in reality, we’re only seeing fragments of their thoughts—often the least considered ones.

Think about it. How many friendships, collaborations, or even casual interactions have been derailed because of an opinion someone posted online that you didn’t agree with? How many potential connections have been snuffed out before they even started because we judged someone by one fleeting moment of thought?

It’s exhausting. And it’s unnecessary.

What if we brought a little mystery back to our relationships? What if we reclaimed the art of getting to know people over time, letting their opinions emerge naturally and in context rather than having them hurled at us from a digital soapbox? What if we stopped equating opinions with identity and allowed people the grace to grow, to change, to hold contradictions?

I’m not saying we should all clam up and never share what we think. But maybe we could take a page from the “before times” and be more deliberate about who we share with, when we share, and why.

So perhaps, we save our opinions for those moments of real connection, for the people who care enough to sit down and talk them through with us, not just scroll past them.

Because at the end of the day, opinions don’t define us. Our actions do. And if we spent less time shouting into the void and more time actually doing things that reflect our values, maybe we’d find we have a lot less to say and a lot more to show for it…but that’s just my opinion.

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