Free Your Mind
Losing my opinion
It had been building for some time, but it really came into focus one Sunday afternoon as I sat reading the Observer magazine in a moment of post-log-off relaxation. In it, Steve Coogan was pictured drinking tea from a polystyrene cup in the middle of a road, the inference being that this represented a moment of singular focus in his otherwise crazed existence.
That was when I realised that, despite being three paragraphs in, I had no idea what Coogan was doing in the road, nor what was being hawked through the pages. Moreover, I realised that I simply didn’t care. I gathered myself, folded the magazine and binned it. I had no opinion on the matter.
When was the last time you found yourself blah-blahing on about last night’s television, the new Batman, the sobriety of Amy bloody Winehouse, the overness or otherwise of Converse shoes, the Caucasus or the global recession with the words: “I really have no opinion about that.”
Know your place
Unless you’re a TV executive, Heath Ledger’s mum, Amy Winehouse’s dad, a ‘cool-hunter’ or cartographer, what you think means zero – at best. You may be affected by the economic nosedive but any thoughts you have are unlikely to filter through to the US Treasury and the World Bank and expose you as some kind of fiscal messiah.
But wait! The irrelevance of your opinions on this and just about every other subject is not a cause for despondency. Losing your opinions will, in fact, set you free.
Pushkin, in his epic Eugene Onegin – which, to be frank, I have no thoughts on one way or the other – gave his feckless protagonist the highest praise in describing him as “disburdened of the world’s opinions”. And the relentless pushing of a thousand issues which have no importance is enough to make Pushkin’s world seem almost attractive, where only earth-shattering news made it to the dinner table thanks to hopeless infrastructure and newsprint made from potatoes.
The hell of rolling news
Like a lot of Bad Things, the effluent we’re asked to care about on a daily basis can be traced back to 11 September, 2001. Before that, rolling news was just something braying futures brokers and other news journalists watched. Sure, like kids watching an illicit horror movie that both thrills and disturbs, we stayed up late the first time around to watch Baghdad get greased live on CNN. But it was those 9/11 boys that really turned us into fodder for the news networks.
The dread phrase “a report out today…” began to head up stories as pressure groups and think-tank briefings replaced journalism in the slog to fill endless schedules. And then, and this is the real crack cocaine of the news world, some shark fresh out of telly school came up with the idea of “interactivity” or worse “citizen journalism” and the phrase “let us know what you think” made it a crime not to care about school league tables, Andrea Corr’s rectal reconstruction, or whether plastic carrier bags account for 1% or 0.7% of landfill sites.
Along the way to losing your opinion on these trivialities, you’ll notice just how much of your brain-space is taken up with the gestation of pointless factuality and the dissemination of little bits of unwisdom through countless lift conversations and phatic communion grown from a sense of duty rather than a willingness to engage. You’d better prepare to fill up that vast Serengeti of consciousness with something useful (not this article): nature abhors a vacuum and will fill it with wibbling madness and venal obsession if you drop your guard.
The irrelevance of your opinions on just about every subject is not a cause for despondency. Losing your opinions will, in fact, set you free
Road less travelled
This is a dangerous path, and one that will surely set you apart from your fellow man.
There’s a vast difference between ditching the intellectual junk-food and becoming totally disengaged from the world. It’s true, there are those who have done so and have gone on to become high achievers: they’re called ‘sociopaths’ and their finest hours have usually involved dismembering a hobo in a dank basement, wearing heavy makeup and their mother’s skin. What’s required here is a sense of proportion.
Remember that the maxim “no news is good news” is too frequently taken to mean that hope is always extant, or to put it in colonial vernacular: “It ain’t over till the fat lady sings.” Another, wiser, reading is that the absence of intrusion bypointless goings-on is a blessing.
There will be those who’ll argue that human history has been served well by our restless curiosity, but in fact the lessons of history suggest that when something happens that you really need to have an opinion on – say, the Black Death, or Kristalnacht – you’ll probably get to hear about it. Until then, save your Wisdom of Solomon for something that’s more than cerebral white noise. Because a report out today claims noise is a cause of stress for 54% of Britons. Let us know what you think about that…
