People are Fickle: On disagreement, attachment, and my remarkable ability to piss off everyone equally

Apparently, I have a gift.

I can piss off the left and the right with the exact same sentence.

Honestly, I’m a little proud of that.

The other day, Fox News posted a story on Facebook about a Flock camera mishap in Brookfield, WI. Police received bad information, stopped someone who wasn’t actually the person they were looking for, and drew their weapons during the encounter.

My contribution to the comment section was:

“But notice how no one resisted and no one got shot. 🙃”

That was it.

One sentence.

One sarcasm emoji.

And somehow, I managed to irritate people from opposite ends of the political spectrum.

Achievement unlocked: bipartisan disapproval.

What can I say?

I like to stir the proverbial cauldron. 😏

What made it even better was what happened next.

People on the left apparently decided I must be on the right.

People on the right apparently decided I must be on the left.

Which was fascinating, considering I hadn’t actually said anything about my political affiliation at all.

They inferred it.

Apparently, challenging this particular idea meant I must belong to that particular team.

And this is where things get especially funny.

They were all wrong about me.

And, depending on the issue, they were probably all right about me, too.

I hold positions that could easily be labeled liberal. I hold others that could easily be labeled conservative. There are plenty that fit comfortably into neither category, and still others where I think both sides have managed to make perfectly reasonable points while simultaneously talking past each other.

So, calling me a “leftist” or a “rightist” based on one sarcastic Facebook comment tells you considerably more about the person assigning the label than it does about me.

But the funniest part?

My comment had nothing to do with either one.

I wasn’t declaring allegiance to a political tribe.

I was pointing at an inconsistency.

That’s it.

Everyone else supplied the hat.

And somehow, within the same comment thread, I was apparently wearing both of them.

Honestly, that feels like an accomplishment.

But as entertaining as I found the responses, the whole thing made me realize something about myself—and perhaps about my somewhat colorful track record with other human beings:

I challenge everyone.

Not just people I disagree with.

Everyone.

In fact, sometimes I’m more inclined to challenge people I agree with, because agreement doesn’t magically make an argument logical.

You can arrive at a conclusion I completely agree with and support it with reasoning that makes absolutely no sense, and unfortunately for both of us, I am probably going to point that out.

I can’t help myself.

“Well, yes, I agree with you…but that part doesn’t make sense.”

Apparently, people don’t always enjoy this.

Who knew?🙃

I Don’t Take Myself—or Much Else—Too Seriously

There’s probably another relevant detail I should disclose before we go much further.

I don’t tend to take myself—or much else—too seriously.

But my sense of humor isn’t necessarily obvious.

I tend toward friendly sarcasm and a kind of understated wit that doesn’t always announce itself as humor. I can say something completely ridiculous with the same expression and tone I’d use to tell you what I had for breakfast.

There is no flashing SARCASM sign.

No dramatic wink.

Sometimes not even enough of a change in tone to help you out.

You either catch it…

…or you don’t.

And catching it sometimes requires a certain quickness—the ability to recognize subtext, contradiction, absurdity, or the fact that what I just said makes considerably more sense if you assume I couldn’t possibly have meant it literally.

Unfortunately, that means my humor can be spectacularly misinterpreted.

And familiarity is apparently no guarantee against this.

People who don’t know me well may not realize I’m being sarcastic.

People who do know me well may understand perfectly well that I’m being sarcastic—and still not appreciate what I’m pointing at.

Those are two very different problems.

Something intended as friendly sarcasm can be interpreted as criticism.

Something witty can be taken literally.

Something meant to point out the absurdity of a situation can be interpreted as me trivializing the situation itself.

And sometimes the humor is understood exactly as intended…

and the person simply doesn’t find it funny.

Fair enough.

I’m usually sufficiently amused for both of us.

Because much of what I find funny isn’t funny because I don’t appreciate the seriousness of it.

It’s funny because I do.

I notice contradictions.

I notice irony.

I notice when human beings somehow manage to hold two incompatible ideas simultaneously without noticing the collision.

And sometimes the most efficient response my brain can produce is one perfectly straight-faced sentence pointing directly at it.

That little upside-down smiley was carrying an unreasonable amount of philosophical baggage.

And perhaps that’s worth knowing before reading anything else I write:

If something I say sounds just slightly too absurd, pointed, or perfectly timed to be taken entirely at face value…there is a reasonable chance it wasn’t meant to be.

Although I make no guarantees.

You’ll just have to keep up.

I Don’t Need You to Agree With Me

I’ve never particularly understood why disagreement has to be threatening.

Tell me I’m wrong.

Tell me why.

Challenge something I believe.

Show me the hole in my reasoning.

Give me information I haven’t considered.

Hell, make me completely reconsider my position.

That’s interesting!

I don’t consider changing my mind a loss.

If you give me better information and I change my opinion because of it, congratulations—we’ve accomplished something.

But I’ve realized that not everyone experiences disagreement that way.

For some people, an opinion isn’t simply something they think.

It’s part of who they are.

Their politics, worldview, profession, parenting philosophy, spirituality, lifestyle, social group—or whatever else has become intertwined with their sense of identity— aren’t ideas sitting on a table where we can both pick them up, turn them over, inspect them, and put them back down.

The ideas are attached to the self.

So when you poke the idea, they feel the poke.

Challenge the belief and, whether you intended to or not, you’ve challenged them.

And suddenly a conversation about an idea becomes personal.

I’m Not Particularly Attached to My Ideas

That doesn’t mean I don’t have convictions.

I have plenty.

It certainly doesn’t mean I don’t have opinions.

God knows I have those.

It means I try not to confuse what I believe with who I am.

What I believe today is simply the best conclusion I’ve reached with the information, experiences, and perspective currently available to me.

Tomorrow I might learn something new.

And then I’ll have to rearrange some furniture upstairs.

That’s fine.

I’d rather have an evolving worldview than spend my life defending something I’ve stopped examining simply because I once declared it true.

Maybe that’s why I enjoy debate so much.

I’m not necessarily trying to win.

Sometimes I’m testing the furniture.

Does this argument actually hold up?

Does this principle still apply when the roles are reversed?

Would I believe the same thing if the person doing it belonged to the group I dislike instead of the group I identify with?

Am I applying the same standard consistently?

What happens if I take this argument to its logical conclusion?

And my personal favorite:

Can two seemingly contradictory things be true at the same time?

Usually, yes.

Life is terribly inconvenient that way.

Nobody Has Argued With Me More Than I Have

This is also why I write.

I have thoughts all the time. Strong ones, occasionally.

Okay, frequently. 😅

But there’s a considerable distance between having a thought and deciding I believe it enough to put my name underneath it.

So I write it down.

And then I argue with myself.

I look for the exception.

I reverse the roles.

I try to find the contradiction.

I take my reasoning to its ugliest possible conclusion.

I ask whether I’d still believe it if the people involved were different.

I look for the assumption hiding inside the sentence that sounded perfectly reasonable five minutes ago.

Sometimes I discover that I was wrong.

More often, I discover that I wasn’t exactly wrong.

I was insufficiently precise.

And those are some of my favorite discoveries.

In fact, while writing this very blog post, I nearly wrote that one of the few things that will make me walk away from someone is watching them knowingly enable something that is genuinely harmful to another person. End point.

That sounded perfectly reasonable.

Until I stopped.

Wait.

Who gets to define “harm”?

Me?

The other person?

The person supposedly being harmed?

Society?

Because people on completely opposite sides of an issue can sincerely believe that the other person’s position is causing harm.

Suddenly one perfectly innocent sentence had smuggled in an enormous assumption:

that my perception of harm was necessarily the correct one.

Well, shit.

Back to the examination table it goes.

This is what I do.

Over.

And over.

And over.

Because an idea that cannot survive my own scrutiny certainly isn’t ready for everyone else’s.

Maybe that’s also why disagreement doesn’t offend me very easily.

That isn’t to say I’m impossible to hurt. Offense and hurt aren’t necessarily the same thing.

By the time you encounter one of my published opinions, you may think you’re the first person challenging it.

My friend, you are approximately number 37.

The previous 36 were also me.

Nobody has argued with me more than I have.

You Can Disagree With Me. Apparently I Can’t Always Disagree With You.

This may be the realization I’ve found most entertaining.

I can sit across from someone while they tell me exactly what they think.

About politics.

Religion.

Relationships.

Society..

Me.

They can disagree with my choices, question my reasoning, criticize something I believe, or tell me outright that they think I’m wrong.

And I’m generally fine.

I might argue back.

I might ask questions.

I might tell them they’re wrong.

But their disagreement doesn’t threaten our relationship from my end.

Then eventually I say something they don’t like.

And suddenly I’ve crossed some invisible line.

I’m argumentative.

I’m difficult.

I’m insensitive.

I’m “always challenging everything.”

The conversation needs to stop.

Sometimes, eventually, so does the relationship.

And I’ve spent enough years watching variations of this pattern repeat that I’ve finally had to consider the common denominator.

Hello.

It’s me. 👋

Strangely, that realization doesn’t bother me.

I find it fascinating.

But There Is a Line

Being comfortable with disagreement doesn’t mean I’ll entertain absolutely anything forever.

There is a point where debate stops being debate.

Sometimes it stops before it ever gets the chance to begin.

I will walk away when I’m not allowed to speak for myself.

There’s an important distinction here. Nobody owes me an endless debate. Someone is perfectly entitled to say, “I don’t want to continue this conversation.” I can respect that.

But if you’ve already decided what I think, why I think it, what my intentions were, or what kind of person I am—and then deny me the opportunity to speak for myself—you haven’t disagreed with me.

You’ve had an argument with the version of me you created in your own head.

I can’t participate in that.

And I won’t chase someone around trying to convince them to hear me.

If there is room for your perspective but none for mine, we don’t have a disagreement.

We don’t even have a conversation.

We have a verdict.

And I’m not particularly interested in standing trial in a courtroom where the conclusion was reached before I entered the room.

So I walk away.

Not because I couldn’t tolerate what you had to say.

Because you had already decided you couldn’t tolerate hearing what I had to say.

I’ve noticed another point where debate stops being debate.

It often happens when someone stops defending the argument they’re making and reaches for something else instead.

We’ve gone back and forth.

I’ve made my case.

They’ve made theirs.

I’ve challenged their reasoning.

They’ve challenged mine.

And then something changes.

They stop addressing the argument and start addressing me.

Suddenly we’re talking about my character, my appearance, my intelligence, my motives, my personality, my profession, my life—or whatever personal ammunition happens to be within reach.

And that’s usually the moment I think:

Ah. There it is.

Not because a personal attack means I’ve won the argument.

It doesn’t.

Someone can call me an asshole and still have the better argument.😂

Those things are not mutually exclusive.

But when someone abandons the subject and reaches for the person instead, the conversation has given me a different kind of information.

At that point, I’m learning considerably more about you than I am about whatever we were debating.

And that matters to me.

I won’t walk away from someone because they disagreed with me.

I won’t walk away because they challenged me.

I won’t even walk away because we had a spectacular argument and neither of us changed our minds.

Hell, I might like you more afterward.

But I may walk away when disagreement reveals a kind of character I don’t want close to me.

I’m not walking away from the argument.

I’m walking away from what the argument revealed.

There’s a difference.

And Even My Boundaries Need Examining

There are also situations where the subject isn’t theoretical.

Sometimes I have direct knowledge of what’s happening. I’ve witnessed the behavior, experienced its consequences, or watched it affect someone involved.

And sometimes another person continues to excuse, normalize, or enable it despite knowing what is happening.

That matters to me, too.

But even here, I have to be careful.

Because “harm” is an extraordinarily easy word to weaponize once we’ve convinced ourselves that our interpretation is unquestionably correct.

My willingness to walk away from something does not make my assessment objectively true.

I can have incomplete information, misunderstand motives, carry biases I haven’t discovered yet, or simply be wrong.

Intellectual non-attachment means I don’t get to exempt myself from scrutiny just because something feels morally obvious to me.

At the same time, intellectual humility doesn’t require abandoning discernment.

I don’t need omniscience to decide what I’m willing to participate in.

There comes a point when I can say:

I may not possess the objective truth about this situation, but I’ve seen enough to know I don’t want this dynamic in my life.

That isn’t a declaration about someone else’s absolute moral character.

It’s a decision about my own participation.

And I’m comfortable making it.

People Are Fickle

Human beings say they value honesty until honesty becomes uncomfortable.

We praise critical thinking when it’s directed at the beliefs of people we disagree with.

We admire people who “question everything” right up until they start questioning our thing.

And I’m not saying that makes everyone hypocritical or terrible.

It makes them human.

People protect belonging.

They protect identity.

They protect the stories that make the world feel coherent.

Sometimes disagreement feels like curiosity.

Sometimes it feels like rejection.

Sometimes an intellectual debate for one person feels like an emotional confrontation to another.

I’ve probably underestimated that difference plenty of times because disagreement simply doesn’t carry the same emotional weight for me.

That’s useful information.

It doesn’t mean I’m going to stop challenging people.

Sorry.🤷‍♀️

Sometimes You Leave. Sometimes I Do.

I’ve reached a point in my life where I don’t need every relationship to last forever in order for it to have been worthwhile.

People come.

People go.

Sometimes we grow together.

Sometimes we grow differently.

Sometimes someone who once loved the way your mind worked eventually becomes exhausted by the exact same quality.

And sometimes an argument reveals something about another person that makes you realize the relationship has run its course.

People are fickle.

Perhaps that isn’t even a criticism.

Maybe it’s simply an observation.

We change. Our tolerances change. Our relationships change. What once drew us to someone can eventually become the very thing that pushes us apart.

There’s something wonderfully freeing about allowing that to be true without turning every ending into a tragedy or every disagreement into evidence that someone has wronged you.

Maybe someone stops talking to me because I challenged them one too many times.

Maybe they decided I’m exhausting.

Maybe I am exhausting to them.

That’s okay.

They are allowed to leave.

And sometimes I’m allowed to look at what an interaction revealed and decide:

Nope. I don’t need that energy in my life.

Not because they failed to agree with me.

But because disagreement showed me how they behave when agreement disappears.

There’s a tremendous difference.

So, By All Means, Tell Me I’m Wrong

I’d rather have relationships in which both people are allowed to say:

“I think you’re wrong.”

And then sit down together and ask:

“Okay. Why?”

Not because either of us needs to win.

Not because disagreement is some intellectual blood sport.

But because there are few things more interesting than discovering where another person’s reasoning came from—and discovering whether your own can survive the examination.

Maybe you’ll change my mind.

Maybe I’ll change yours.

Maybe we’ll both leave thinking the other person is completely full of shit and meet for coffee next Tuesday anyway.

Beautiful.

So yes.

I will probably continue saying things that occasionally piss off everyone in the room.

I will continue challenging arguments I disagree with.

I will continue challenging arguments I agree with.

I will continue challenging myself.

And every once in a while, I’ll drop a single sarcastic sentence into a Facebook comment section and somehow achieve bipartisan unity by giving everyone something to be irritated about.

What can I say?

I believe in bringing people together. 🤗💞😉