There is an art to replying and commenting, and probably like 60-70% of people I’ve seen on the internet fail at it. The important thing is not to speak your mind, but to “support” the OP. You can support them by disagreeing well & you can “mis-support” them by agreeing stupidly.
Every “utterance” (status, tweet, whatever) is a bit of an invitation, a bit of a proposal. “Let’s play this game”. When strangers read the proposal accurately, and support the game, a shared understanding develops. You can make friends this way.
Some people deliberately choose to ignore, misread, disregard or denounce other people’s bids. Others are outright clueless and don’t know how to play, and sometimes cluelessness leads to worse bungling than deliberate malice (JJ’s razor: “The intentionality of an agent with behavior sufficiently indistinguishable from malice, is irrelevant.”)
I was a lot more belligerent and disagreeable when I was younger, in part because I simplistically thought playing other people’s games was a sheep-like way to live. Why should I support other people’s dumb games? Why not mock them instead? It’s easy, and intoxicating.
We can’t choose where we are born, or our family, and our initial set of friends is heavily influenced by happenstance. But we can choose who we want to be associated with subsequently. All problems are interpersonal problems, but we kind of get to choose which ones we want.
Many different lines of enquiry have led me to this same conviction:
The best guiding question in life is, “Who do you want to share this life with?”
Everything else can be determined from this question. Your ethics, beliefs, actions, habits…
tbc
tbc