2 Essay Samples - let's argue

An essay series about a zillion topics with no real umbrella. These are 2 examples.

ESSAY 1: STFU

I read somewhere that today’s generation is the smartest of all time.

True, we have access to the most information, bar none. It doesn’t take much for me to Google any question, inane or pertinent, and get a detailed answer in seconds.

Gone are the days of physical books and library databases. I had a professor once explain how we would need to use academic journals and walk us through how we’d navigate the Dewey decimal system at the university library.

Bless his Boomer heart. None of us had the guts to tell him that we’d all just use Google Scholar.

We have the world at our fingertips. A tiny computer in our pocket. All the knowledge we could want, more than we could ever absorb. So, I guess I understand why it would make sense to draw the conclusion that we’d also be the smartest.

But, sadly, that label is the farthest from the truth.

The same generation that could potentially read any book that’s ever existed with a few clicks can barely manage the attention span for a 10 minute video. We don’t scroll beyond the first link on a Google search. Content has been distilled from a paragraph to a caption. An article to a clickbait title.

I’m not against dumbassery. You know what, fine. Be as ignorant as you want to be, that’s your prerogative.

I’m not worried about whether or not we’re the smartest. Because human beings somehow made it this far even when we couldn’t put two sticks together to make fire.

My real problem is this: can you possibly, maybe, shut the fuck up?

I think there are so many issues - the misinformation, the apathy, the buffoonery, all of it. But more than all of that, the most deadly epidemic I can see is that despite the fact that people don’t know and really don’t care to know, they love to fucking talk.

So, I implore you…shut up.

I think somewhere along the line, we started thinking that we have to contribute to every conversation that’s being had. That for every issue, we are duty-bound to weigh in.

Never mind that we don’t know, don’t research, and don’t even really care: we feel like, if asked (or maybe even unprompted), we should have some kind of input for every topic under the sun.

I assure you, that’s not the case. You can close your mouth at any time - that’s always been an option.

But, it’s my freedom of speech!

It’s also the freedom to not speak.

The beautiful fact that you don’t have to chime in. If someone asks how you feel about the conflicts in the Middle East, and you don’t even know what countries are included in that region, you can just keep your mouth shut. How easy was that?

I’ll let you in on a secret: you’re allowed to not know something.

I learned this the hard way as a teacher. A student would ask me a tough question, and I’d scramble to make up an answer: a straight-up guess or something vague like I was writing for a horoscope page in the newspaper.

Sometimes, I’d get away with it, and sometimes, some little smartass would come back later having realized that I was dead wrong.

But - I told myself - I was the teacher! It was my obligation to know. I needed to be an expert: I had to be part of every conversation, lead every discussion, and, most importantly, I had to be right. Right?

It took me so long to realize that I could just say: “You know what? I don’t know the answer. But great question! I’ll get back to you on that.”

Or, when I got even more confident in my anti-omniscience: “Why don’t you go look it up and let me know?” and “What’s your opinion?”

Think about how much you’d learn if you shut up for a while. Your friend introduces a topic they care about, and instead of offering your half-baked thoughts, you admit you’ve never really looked into it - and ask them to tell you more.

Someone once said “The more you know, the more you know that you know nothing.” I could’ve said it was Aristotle who wrote that, but the truth is…I don’t really know. God knows I messed up and paraphrased it. And, honestly, it’s kind of a relief to say that - repeat after me: I’m a dummy. Feels good, doesn’t it?

Some people are definitely know-it-alls. But I think most of us are just cosplaying as the smartest person in the room and hoping no one fact-checks us on Google.

I know that’s counter to me right now, ranting throughout these essays with all of my loud opinions. I never said I wasn’t included under the dumbass umbrella. I could probably stand to shut up once in a while.

Not yet, mind you. But in theory.

ESSAY 2: And another thing...


Building off of the need to start saying “idk,” I have another thought.

Don’t be afraid to change your mind once in a while.

Some of y’all wrote a political Facebook rant in 2010 that you’re still going hard behind a decade later.

You know full well that you don’t believe that shit anymore. You might not have been 100% sure at the time. But you don’t want to contradict your past self, so you will die on a hill you don’t even like. A nasty, abandoned hill. Not even a hill - it’s an ant pile, and it’s coming back to bite you in the ass.

Wow, that pun wrote itself. Nice one.

But seriously. I think it was Walt Whitman (again, I have no idea) who once said:

“Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself.”

I shouldn’t have put quotation marks on that one…I probably just mangled the wording. Sorry, Walt. But you get the idea. The freeing feeling of those words - the shrug that says, “Oh well, I’m different now. Cool.”

Or, as Henry David Thoreau once said (I definitely actually know this one, but I’m paraphrasing here):

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

I gotta retract Thoreau from that one…I second-guessed myself, fact-checked, and Google humbled me: it’s Emerson. But tomato, tomahto.

Anyway, I have an actual point here. What I’m saying is: you’re allowed to not know now what you definitely knew back then. A tongue twister, huh?

My mom used to tell me: if you’re not a Democrat when you’re young, you have no heart. If you’re not a Conservative when you’re old, you have no brain.

I don’t necessarily agree with the specifics of her politics there, but I agree with the broader idea: changing over time is a mark of intelligence. We shouldn’t sort out our opinions all at one time and then frame them in a museum somewhere in our minds, never to be revisited or revised.

We learn in grade school the difference between facts and opinions, but they fail to tell us that opinions are fed facts. The more you feed them, the more they grow and develop.

Some of us have been given facts over the years, but we starve our opinions anyway. They’re emaciated. You leave them hungry because you’re afraid evolving means betraying some past version of yourself you feel obligated to defend to the death.

You love to prove someone else wrong, but you won’t give yourself that same energy. An exercise: write down your opinion, then pretend it’s a post from your annoying great uncle on Facebook or something. And…attack!

We’re supposed to change. It might not be a 180, but if you never budge, no matter what you learn along the way, that isn’t intelligence, commitment, or principles - that’s stagnation.

Let’s say I’m a 20-year-old childless woman. I have a staunch opinion on motherhood solely based on observations of mothers around me. I tell everyone who’ll listen that I’ll never give my kid an iPad, they’ll never be allowed to throw a fit in the grocery store, and I’ll only use cloth diapers.

It’d be crazy if 20 years and 3 kids later, my opinions are all the same. I’ve gained new knowledge. I have real-world experience. My kid’s a nightmare in public. Cloth diapers are revolting. I eat my words, and they taste horrible.

So, take a new stance. Look fondly on your past self, dumb as you were, and know that 10 years from now, you’ll feel dumb that you felt smart in this moment, too.

And if someone calls you on it, fine. Boo-hoo. I changed my mind. That’s a good thing. I am open to all the information life offers, and I’m different right now than I was twenty minutes ago. Go kick rocks.

I hope that I reread some of these essays 10 years down the line and laugh at myself and everything I thought I knew.

My friends love to call me “loud and wrong.” I say it’s more like “loud and working through some things.” Either way, I don’t mind the teasing. I want to argue with them passionately at this moment - and passionately against myself years down the line.

Cage match. To the death.

They’ll love watching the fossilized version of me go head-to-head with old-hag me, who’s probably even meaner than I am now. I’ll be extra cancelled, huh?

Changing doesn’t make me wrong then or wrong now. I could be wrong then and right now, kind of wrong then and less wrong now, right then and wrong now, or dead wrong every step of the way. The possibilities are endless. I love that.

Very well, I contradict myself.

Thank God I change, because right now, I’m insufferable.