Too many opinions, not enough thinking

Opinions are like the water surrounding you on a desert island: you have plenty of it, but it doesn’t do you any good. Such are the opinions offered so freely by others. I can handle advice when I ask for it; it’s when people place such high value on their insight—they think you can’t possibly live without it—that it bothers me. But I suppose the reverse is true as well; I sometimes feel I have lots of advice I could offer someone else, but it wouldn’t be my place unless they ask for it. And that’s not to assume my advice is any good either.

But opinions are a funny thing—people feel free to offer an opinion if they know that they won’t have to act on it themselves. They say things like, “You know what I would do in your situation?”, but when push comes to shove you find that they wouldn’t actually do it. When you think about it, that’s not very helpful. They’re conveniently removing themselves from the direct consequences while placing you right in front of them. That’s like walking someone onto the railroad tracks and saying, “I have a feeling things will work out if you stand right here.” Thanks. Next time I need advice, don’t call me, I’ll call you. But I wouldn’t wait by the phone.
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Don’t get me wrong—it can be valuable to get a number of opinions, but then you have to go through a sort of vetting process to measure which ones actually make sense. It’s here that some kind of thinking needs to be involved. Unfortunately, the opinions we receive—not much thinking was involved in them. Critical thinking, in my opinion, has become something of a lost art. I think it should be a required class in every stage of our schooling. We’re trained how to remember facts, but we’re not trained how to think for ourselves. We’re not trained how to approach a problem logically. We’re trained how to feel about things, but we’re not given a framework for developing how we came to those feelings. You can ask someone how they feel, but you can’t ask someone how they came to feel that way. I suppose the fear is that in such a case their brain will go tilt!—two different processes working at cross-purposes. They seem to be saying, “You can’t ask me such penetrating questions. Don’t ask me to think and feel at the same time.” Sorry, my apologies.

So what do we do with opinions aplenty? I suppose we graciously say, “thank you”, and go about our way. We can use our own brains to filter the good from the bad, even if they don’t want to bother. In fact, some of their advice might not be so bad. Just apply a little thinking of your own and you might be able to revise some of it to your own use.

…Let’s go deeper

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