Freddie deBoer (HT: @ayjay), in a post that begins with his thoughts on a bad take about Fury Road, zooms out to consider larger questions around why we hold certain opinions. He rightly concludes that people hold wrong opinions “because they are impressionable and they’re impressionable because it’s scary to stand alone.” While we might think we hold “intelligent” opinions about any number of matters, Freddie suggests that we essentially latch on to memes (or, we could add, podcasts or TikTok videos or whatever) to substitute for real thinking because real thinking is hard. As he says, “I think ideas become memes because a lot of people are afraid to have their own ideas. I think people say this sort of thing because the internet has taught them that the only thing that matters in life is appearing clever and so they say stuff other people have already preapproved of as clever ideas.” He ties all this to the “rampant emotional insecurity” that a lot of us feel. His closing words are spot on:

People feel that they have to make incisive or witty observations about everything around them, in order to be liked, and fumbling around in the burlap sacks of their minds they find only those baubles that someone else crafted. So they throw them out there. And, over time, these things get repeated so often, so insistently, and by so many people who are wracked with a need for social approval so deep I can’t comprehend it, in spite of how wrong they are I’m tempted to say, well, who am I to blow against the wind?

Ah, the baubles in my burlap sack. Ouch.