I’ve never watched an episode of Family Feud without getting extremely upset.
If there’s one thing that show has taught me it’s that when you ask a hundred people the same question you’re going to get some stupid answers. It’s infuriating that each opinion counts equally towards the final total.
The opinions themselves are worthless on their own. It is the show’s producers who give them value. While contestants may argue and complain, it all comes down to what the survey says and what the gameshow pays.
Sometimes surveys are just inherently wrong.
I’ve tried to give deference to surveys in my personal life with disastrous effect.
One of the most serious disagreements my wife Jenny and I have ever had was over whether the “top” of a slice of pizza is the crust or the point. It developed naturally as a point of confusion and frustrated me a great deal.
That anyone would say the top is anything but the tip was utterly ludicrous and offensive to me. I’ve never heard anyone say “crust-top” but can point to countless examples of the well-used phrase “tip top.”
We were clearly at an impasse so I took the question to Facebook and was horrified when my friends agreed with Jenny at a 3-to-1 ratio. It was one of the darkest chapters in our relationship.
As passionate beings, we’re wired to find meaning but we’re more unified by zealotry than by denomination. A sports fan applying his team’s color with face paint has far more in common with a face-painting fan of a rival team than he does with the average fan of his own team.
Because our culture teaches that it’s important to have an opinion, we get really weird about presenting and defending ours, as if its an extension of ourselves.
But it’s not. It’s just an opinion and should be susceptible to change.
I used to think that Michelangelo was the coolest Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. I’m embarrassed to admit it now. He had such high energy and looked like he really enjoyed those nunchucks. I was young and easily got sucked in by the fun catchphrases.
It’s clear now that the Leonardo is the coolest because he demonstrates leadership and uses an awesome sword. But truthfully, I don’t think much about ninja turtles anymore – at least not the teenage mutant kind.
And yet I’m stuck with these worthless opinions and will probably have them for the rest of my life.
Oftentimes the impulse to have strong opinions is stronger than the opinions themselves.
I had a viscerally negative reaction to my local minor league baseball franchise’s debut of the team name “Hartford Yard Goats,” and so did most people in the community. But we’ve all since embraced the name as a quirky and fun identity that brings joy to scores of families.
I can’t help having these opinions, but I’m getting better at letting them have less of an impact on my life. It’s important to recognize that opinions evolve even if the impulse to have them forever remains.
The activists who were trying to keep big box stores out of their town twenty years ago are the same ones now who are mourning the shuttering of Toys R Us as deeply as they once mourned the closing of a mildew-stained toy store on Main Street. They’re just like frogs hopping to a different lily pad while floating in the same drainage pond called “change is scary.”
Our culture is right in teaching that opinions are important, but they’re the end product of the qualities that we should actually be celebrating.
We should expand our focus to recognize the elements that lead to that impulse: situational awareness, social responsibility, and civic engagement.
These elements may be harder to recognize but they’re worth a whole lot more. No matter what the survey says.
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