New Year resolution: clear out the opinions

 

At this time of year, many people make resolutions.

If there were one I would recommend, it would be to have fewer opinions about things that lie beyond your control. Why? Because opinions about such things leads to frustration; frustration leads to anger; and anger shapes a person you may not wish to become. If you want to improve your character, focus instead on what you can influence — things that sit within your sphere of control.

So think about this: which of your opinions actually improve your life?

Where can one find knowledge and wisdom?

I often meet people who make very strong claims to knowledge.

Some speak with certainty about medicine.
Some confidently assert what is morally good.
Others proclaim great wisdom about politics.

Yet when I try to learn from them, something curious happens. When asked to explain their reasoning, many offer little more than repetition. The same point is restated again and again, but the assumptions beneath it remain unexplored, and its implications unexamined. Few seem able to imagine the issue from another point of view.

It is almost as if the harder an opinion is pushed, the weaker its foundations become.

So I find myself asking, as I always have:
Where, oh where, can one find knowledge and wisdom?

Experience, Evidence, and Wisdom

 

I have learned much from listening to people speak of what has happened to them. To ignore lived experience is foolish, for experience is how life first presents itself to us.

And yet, I have also learned that experience, by itself, can easily mislead.

Two people may drink the same wine: one falls ill, the other feels no effect at all. It would be strange to conclude, on this basis alone, that the wine is poison ... or that it is harmless. The wise person pauses and asks: What is typical? What is rare? And how can we tell the difference?

Our own experiences matter. But they are only one data point in a world of enormous variation. Some bodies are unusually sensitive. Some circumstances are unusual. Some harms are real, and yet still uncommon.

This is why, when we wish to know what is generally true, we do not rely only on our own story, or even the stories of those closest to us. Instead, we gather many stories, from many people, across many conditions. We compare, we measure, and we look for patterns that persist beyond individual cases.

This does not mean dismissing those who suffered. It means refusing to turn suffering into a universal rule without sufficient grounds.

Wisdom, then, requires a certain humility: the willingness to accept that my experience may not be the norm. And also the courage to accept that sometimes the broader evidence tells a story different from the one my own life happens to tell.

If we abandon objective evidence whenever it conflicts with our personal experience, we are left not with truth, but with competing testimonies; each sincere, each partial, and none able to guide us reliably beyond ourselves.

The task of reason is not to silence experience, but to place it in context.