I used to have opinions. Real ones. The kind you could sit with for a few days, turn over, and still feel sure about. I don't know when that stopped.
Now I scroll and I see a take and I either nod or I briefly disagree and then I keep scrolling. Nothing stays long enough to become anything. And I didn't notice it happening. I only noticed it was gone.
There's this thing that happens now. You watch a video. You finish a movie. You read a post. You feel a vague reaction to it. And before you've had a chance to figure out what that reaction actually is, you've already seen fifteen other people's reactions. And somehow, without deciding to, you've adopted one of theirs.
I do this constantly. I'll finish watching something and feel unsettled by it and instead of sitting with that feeling, I'll scroll the comments. And the comments tell me what I think. Someone will have already named the thing I was half-feeling, but sharper, more confident. So I take it. I carry their conclusion around like it was mine.
The feeling that came before all of that, that vague unsettled thing before I opened the comments section, that was actually closer to a real thought than anything that comes after. But it feels unfinished. Uncertain. So I skip past it and let someone else complete it for me.
It's not just articles or books. It's everything. A YouTube video ends and I'm already in the comments before the feeling from the video has settled. A movie wrecks me emotionally and within two minutes I'm reading what other people thought of it, replacing my raw reaction with a more polished borrowed one. Someone posts something on Facebook that I find irritating and I don't even ask myself why it irritates me. I just scroll until I find someone who already wrote the irritation down. And I just put a ‘like’ or ‘heart’ reaction or I just comment, “I agree”.
And this starts to feel normal. Reacting starts to feel like thinking. Absorbing other people's conclusions starts to feel like forming your own.
I've done this for long enough that I genuinely don't know the difference anymore. Whether what I think about something is mine or just the fastest available version of a thought that I happened to pick up before the moment passed.
Everything is shareable now and I think that's part of it. Sharing has a speed requirement. If you share something too late it's already old. So you react quickly. You post before you've processed. You perform having a take without actually forming one.
The comments reward this. The most confident, most sharply worded reaction gets the likes. The person still sitting with the feeling, still not sure, still turning it over, they have nothing to post yet. So they stay quiet and read the comments. And then they leave with someone else's opinion.
The other thing is how lopsided the consumption has become. I watch a lot. I read a lot. I scroll a lot. I feel like a person who is across things. But most of what lands in front of me was put there by something trying to keep me engaged. Which means I know a lot about what is currently popular to know. And when I make connections between ideas, I'm mostly recombining the same things everyone else on the same platforms is recombining.
That's not original thought. That's just rearranging.
I don't have a tidy ending to this.
I think the problem is just that thinking takes longer than everything around me is designed for. The reaction happens in a second. The share happens in a second. The comment section fills up in an hour. Real thinking, the kind where you start somewhere and don't know where you're going and end up somewhere you didn't expect, doesn't fit into any of that.
So I stopped doing it. Not because I decided to. Just because I kept taking the faster option until the slower one atrophied.
I'm writing this down because writing is the only thing I've found that forces the long version. You can't scroll past a sentence you're in the middle of. You have to finish it and find out where it goes.
I don't know what I think yet. But I'm less afraid of that than I used to be.
