02A7E: Differences of Opinion

Metro Manila Community Quarantine - Day 624

One of the most amazing things about my life with Tobie is how much we think alike. On one level, we like a lot of the same things and walk away from cultural experiences with generally the same sentiments. It's very rare that we have drastically different opinions about all sorts of pop culture creations whether it's a TV show, movies, or comics. And I guess we're pretty lucky that way - it just sort of reaffirms the many ways we feel so closely connected to one another. 

Social media, on the other hand, often brings you into contact with the random opinions of other people, both those you consider to be friends and other folks on the periphery of your social circles. It's even messier when it comes to things like interest-based Facebook groups or the wild frontier that includes platforms like Twitter and TikTok. The one-directional nature of these platforms brings you into repeated contact with different opinions. 

So while Tobie and I are very aligned in terms of a lot of the things we like or at the very least how we react to things that we get to watch or experience together, there are also a lot of cases when we seem to be in a minority opinion or at least a different one versus some of our friend circles or what different social media platforms choose to show us. We can struggle to get through a particular movie we consider to be terrible and then turn around to encounter different friends or social contacts praising the work in question. Or you can have everyone and their dog posting social media updates about this or that thing that happens to be something we have zero interest in and have no plans of engaging with.

Yes, the infinite diversity and infinite combinations of the human experience means that we're bound to encounter people with different opinions, especially with a playing field as large as the internet. But one can't help but expect that we'd have more friends who see things as we do or at least react to media in a similar manner - but this is not always the case. And while I have not subjected this "feeling" to any sort of statistical analysis, it does feel like something that happens more often than I'd like. 

Does that make me and Tobie some sort of strange outlier of radical views? I certainly don't think so, but every time I come across such differences, it does make me pause a bit. And then you can go to different review or rating sites and see a numerical representation of what the "majority" opinion is versus how we viewed things. Sometimes we agree. Sometimes I don't understand how we ended up on different sides of the fence haha

Oh life.