Wednesday 29 August 2012

Opinionated. (see footnote)

I'm worried by my lack of opinions on anything of interest or importance to anyone but myself.
All the people I know have opinions, some of them have very strong opinions on things that don't actually have any effect on their lives and are completely beyond of their sphere of influence and/or experience.

One opinion, strongly held by many of the people I met, is, pointing at me, "you are an idiot!"
This may or may not be true, I have no opinion on this, but then people holding this opinion do seem to hold it quite strongly which makes it very difficult to argue with.

My lack of opinions has, on many occasions, led to social awkwardness with no little hostility directed toward me and, in some cases, led to a life-time of been shunned by otherwise quite reasonable seeming people.
The reason for this circumstance may, or may not, be, in absence of any opinion of my own, a possibly misguided strategy of taking an opposite or contradictory opinion to the one expressed by my interlocutor, whom I've usually only newly been introduced to.
Devil's advocate if you will.

My perception of this ploy is it's an attempt to allow people to expound on their professed heart-felt opinion thus allowing me to discern, through interpretation, if their contentions have any validity and are truly what they believe or just mouth noises used to fill up awkward silences with people they've just met.
The alternative would be to agree with any opinion expressed,  but that doesn't seem to led any kind of dynamic dialogue unless the person to whom I'm speaking has ingested a huge amount of alcohol then of course the problem is stopping them talking.

In some cases it's easy to take a contrary position because the opinions expressed seem, to me at least, repugnant or it was easy until I was introduced to a gay woman who turned out to be the most virulent racist I've ever met.
That encounter nearly fused my mind as taking any kind of contrary position seemed like a gateway to some *social faux pas or other.

The problem of not having any serious opinions is further compounded by the fact that I was born in Yorkshire which means I'm  culturally obliged to have some strongly held beliefs, or at least that's what I'm led to believe by people who have strong opinions about what people born in Yorkshire are like.
"You can always tell a Yorkshireman, but you can't tell him much".

So, I think it's time for me to develop some strongly held beliefs.
My strongly held beliefs will probably involve bicycles and ukuleles (as every other aspect of my life seems to).

Footnote.
This has been an experiment in writing something using the first word I read after waking this morning.
I'm not sure I'll be doing this very much in the future.

*I'm not sure that actually means what I want to say but it looks good.

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