At a previous parish I had a woman who spent most of her life in a tizzy – worried about this thing or that which, in her mind, threatened to tear the very fabric of the universe. At least in her telling it did. Anyway one day she came into my office exercised about whatever was the crisis de jour – it may have involved light bulbs but my memory is a little fuzzy. Finally, after listening to her go on and on I said, “Alice, you are going to have to realize that there are a lot of things about which I have no opinion.” I do not bring this up to show the Zen like state with which I navigate this terrestrial ball, because there are any number of small insignificant things about which I can overreact to. I instead bring this up as more of an ideal because I think we live in a day and age where people have too many opinions about way too many things with the ultimate result being that we live in times of almost constant agitation.
There was an article in the Wall Street Journal this past week about the rise of the picky eater. That is kids who refuse to eat vast swaths of the food chain. An interesting thing that it pointed out is that picky eating as “a thing” is a relatively new phenomenon. In doing some research the author noted that one of the first mentions was in 1930 in an address to the American Pediatric Society. This address noted that picky eaters were only found in well-off homes and not from places like orphanages, where they ate anything set in front of them. This bit of data would seem to suggest that as food got more plentiful and choices increased so did the instinct to reject food. I wonder in our day of mass communication if perhaps something similar has happened. That is children when given more variety of foods to consume become more opinionated about their food. Are we who are given so many varieties about information to consume, choosing to have very strong opinions on things that previously may have passed unnoticed? In other words if someone were a jerk in Ho-Ho-Cus, New Jersey 150 years ago odds are I probably would not hear about, whereas today it might make the front page of the New York Times or at least be plastered all over social media. This forces me to have an opinion which most likely will be at odds with someone else’s opinion.
I was at the gym the other day and watching one of those home shows where a young couple is seeking to find their dream home. I have to say that I was slightly shocked by just how many opinions this young couple had on the type of house that they had to have, down to the types and location of the toilet. But the funny things was at the end of the program they ended up getting a house that lacked many of the things that were so important at the beginning. But the house they chose was very aesthetically pleasing. What does this say about opinions and reality? We say we want something, will demand it and then find we are happier with something that differs from our stated opinion? Does this mean that our judgments of the world may not only be less important than we thought but may not in fact reflect how we actually feel or want to live?
It seems that the more opinions we have the more miserable we can be, because something is always going to be wrong. Christianity while not necessarily opposing free will and free choice concedes that God is the only one who is capable of always having the right opinion about everything. That is why much has been written about submitting our will to God’s perfect will. And while this may seem like losing our freedom it may free us from the slavery of our own ill informed opinions, the ones that constantly tell us that something is not right, and instead allows for us to live within God’s peace and God’s perfect will. It is quite counter-cultural to take an information sabbatical but it might make us and the world a better place.
When I was in college a friend of mine was a very passionate sports fan and would often spend times in front of the TV yelling very specific instructions to those playing whatever game. A friend of mine one day said, “You do realize that nothing you say here has any effect on what they do there.” It seems our society is trapped in a permanent state of yelling at the television believing that we are somehow changing things for the better when in truth we are just making this world a more disagreeable place.