You don't need an opinion

This week I was talking with a teammate about a programming language he’s exploring. He said:

“I’m just not sure whether I like it or not”

Huh, I thought. Right, you think you have to like something or not.

Easy mistake to make. The internet’s opinion-density is famously high. It’s natural to think that having and sharing opinions is required.

Turns out: no, you don’t need to have an opinion. Nobody forces you to put things into Like and Don’t-Like columns. If someone asks what you think of something you can always say you don’t know.

It wasn’t long ago that I started to understand this and ever since then I have been trying to remind myself and others of it. The conversation this week made me realize that I’ve actually made some progress.

Ask me how I like Rust. I’ve been building a compiler in Rust for the past 2 years and my answer would be: I don’t know, man. There’s things that make me smile, there’s things that make me scratch my head. I don’t know what the overall score is. I’m learning and exploring Zig right now. There’s things that make me say “oh that’s cool” and things that make me say “hmm, not sure I understand”.

It doesn’t matter whether I like it or not. I can use it or not.

That doesn’t mean I never have opinions. I do have them, even strong ones. But I no longer think I have to have an opinion on everything I come across. It’s very, very freeing.

Let the opinions come to you, slowly, over time. Explore and observe, try to find out why you have certain gut reactions, why some things resonate and others don’t. You’ll end up learning much more and, surprise, build up a more complex, nuanced view than if you had approached a new topic with unholstered Like and Hate stamps in hand.