I Have No Opinion

“This is YUCK!”

That’s a frequent remark from my daughter as we sit down for dinner. In fact, it usually comes before she even tastes the food. 

Typically, her comment triggers my standard lecture on making judgments. 

There’s a big difference between saying, “I don’t enjoy this,” which is a true statement about preference, and “This is yuck,” which is a universal statement about the food. You don’t know if the second one is true; other people might find that food to be delicious.

While my practical concern in those moments is to prevent her statements from influencing her brother to also reject his food, the larger lesson is that it’s helpful to distinguish between those two types of expression.   

Here’s the part of the lecture that I don’t share: Why should anyone care about your opinion of the food? Given your lack of expertise in this field, your view is unlikely to be useful to anyone else.

Harsh, I know. That’s why I don’t say it!

But I was thinking about that this week after the torrent of commentary about Simone Biles’ decision to withdraw from competition at the Olympics. For me, it’s not just my instinctual disdain for negative commentary; I ask, Why is it even useful for people to share their opinions about someone else’s behavior that doesn’t affect them? Why is forming a judgment helpful?

In When Things Fall Apart, Buddhist teacher and author Pema Chödrön, recommends being intentional about noticing our judgments. 

When I have done that exercise, it’s usually eye-opening to see just how many opinions I have—and just how many of those opinions serve little purpose. 

For example, a client told me a story last week about traveling through a small Texas town and being turned away from using the restroom at a gas station because the station attendant didn’t like that she was wearing a mask.

My first thought was, “That’s so dumb.” 

But other than making me feel self-righteous, I got nothing out of it. Surely, expressing said opinion would have been even less useful since it provides zero benefit to the world. (That thought is why I’m bad on social media.)

The bigger problem, however, is that having an opinion closes off inquiry. It certainly would have been more useful to start asking questions. What are the psychological or cultural factors that would cause the attendant’s behavior? Why did that action make sense to her?

That’s the point. Opinions can block our learning because they calcify our thinking and increase the odds that we’ll enter into ego-filled contests to defend our perspective. As Chödrön writes: 

“When I talk about noticing opinions, I'm talking about noticing them as a simple way of beginning to pay attention to what we think and do and how much energy comes along with that. Then we can also begin to realize how solid we make things and how easy it is to get into a war in which we want our opinions to win and someone else’s to lose.”

When we’re not starting from curiosity and truth seeking, it actually undermines our ability to influence others to adopt our agenda.

She continues: “It's up to us to sort out what is opinion and what is fact; then we can see intelligently. The more clearly we can see, the more powerful our speech and our actions will be. The less our speech and actions are clouded by opinion, the more they will communicate…. When we don't buy into our opinions and solidified sense of enemy, we will accomplish something. If we don't get swept away by our outrage, then we will see the cause of suffering more clearly.”

So here’s to the benefit of noticing our opinions! (Though I’m not saying you should do the noticing exercise, since that would be an opinion.)