Changing opinions?
Our opinions keep changing. We’d like to think of ourselves as rational beings who take into consideration everything that’d influence our thought process and make highly informed decisions. Others fall for their whims, but we are quite rational and reasonable.
Until it gets too hot and the sweat starts becoming annoying.
There have been ample studies that show how fragile our opinions are, how easily we’re tricked by cognitive biases, how far we underestimate how much we’re going to change, and even who we think our friends really are. The list goes on and on, and the Wikipedia page on this topic is sufficient proof as to how fascinating this topic is for us.
Or, we do not know and we will not know. Or, there are some things we’ll never wrap our heads around. And so it goes with our opinions too. We can come up with some possible explanations for why we hold certain opinions, but how do we explain the feeling that drives us towards those - especially when some of our opinions change so heavily over time (sometimes even in the course of a few minutes, like in debating competitions)?
Maybe a lot of it is rooted in biology and ageing has something to do with it. But there’s our social relations too. No, wait, our workplace shapes us. What about our knowledge? There are just too many variables to effectively keep track of, and what causes our opinions to change maybe isn’t so simple to track down after all!
As of writing this, that’s my opinion - that opinions change considerably - but what if at some point in the future I hold an opinion that opinions remain fairly consistent throughout? Hmm, opinion paradox.
Is it a paradox? I don’t know.