by LemonTree
It feels like we’re living in a golden age of opinions – not good opinions, or well-informed opinions, but… so many of them. Opinions are the new trading cards of the internet: sparkly, numerous, and often utterly worthless. We collect them, trade them, and sometimes weaponize them with all the gravitas of someone swinging a pool noodle and claiming it’s the sword of a legendary king.
The internet has convinced all of us that silence is suspect and doubt is a moral crime. If you take a minute to think, everyone will assume your brain is buffering. If you admit you don’t know something, you’ll be treated like a criminal.
Don’t know shit about a topic? That’s okay. Just say something. Make it sound super confident. Better yet, be factually incorrect but deliver it with enough enthusiasm, and maybe bonus points if you can cite “research” that was only a twelve-second TikTok and a comment section in all caps.
The funniest thing about all of this is that people rarely change their minds anymore. Our minds are airtight vacuum-sealed boxes now, kept fresh until we take them out and eat the same old stuff. We curate, we don’t learn. We reload, we don’t listen. We react without thinking, often long before we even get past the headline.
And the algorithms? They love this stuff. Rage is engagement. Certainty is king. Nuance is an error. The loudest voices are rewarded, not the wisest ones. Which is how we’ve ended up with people in ring lights and with powerful opinions screaming louder than those with actual degrees.
It’s not like people have gotten less intelligent; we’ve all just gotten too busy broadcasting to spend time receiving. We’ve mistaken noise for knowledge, speed for wisdom, and confidence for competence. The end result is that we’re all talking at each other and no one’s listening – like a dinner party where everybody brought their own megaphones.
But the twist is, underneath all the shouting, we all kind of want the same thing – to be seen, heard, and taken seriously. The tragedy is that the louder we yell, the less we can hear.
Art courtesy of Woven Tale Press, “Calm or Chaos“
About the Author
Lemon Tree writes in the shadows.