I can’t remember the last time I took a proper stand.
I’m not sure if it has anything to do with the four years of indoctrination in economics that has paralysed my ability to have a point of view; after all, Harry Truman once said he would much prefer to have one-armed economists instead of those who would always tell him to think “on one hand… and on the other hand…”.
As I reflect on my university years, one thing strikes me: I have become increasingly uncertain of my place in the world and my ability. I have arrived, it seems, at this stage where things move from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence.
To avoid telling people that I have a stand on something, I add euphemisms of uncertainty like “maybe”, “perhaps”, “I would say” and stuff like that. And I realise something: it makes me sound incredibly learned when I add these meaningless fillers in my sentences. It’s just like how a student realises, after reading the fifth journal article that was so long-winded that it could actually have been summarised in one sentence (“Was America right in invading Iraq?”, for instance), that maybe the academic who writes these papers may actually know a lot less than he writes.
No, really, having an opinion is such a pain in the ass. You have to defend it. And the thing is, I realise now that I don’t know everything and I don’t ever think that I will. So it doesn’t quite make sense to set something in stone and then, at a later stage in my life, abashedly smash that stone into pieces because I decided I was wrong.
Since last year’s elections, people around me are just churning articles about politics – they churn them in such garrulousness and quality that I feel like whatever angle that I want to write on has been covered and sealed with superglue.
And so I wait for an opening to arrive.
And then I realise that the opening will never come (seriously, no pun intended). Just as writer’s block will never happen from sitting still and not doing anything, I just need to keep moving in order to move (paradoxical, I know). I need to keep writing about something in order to have a bloody opinion about anything.
And so, ta-dah. I’m back to the keyboard, trying to figure out what I’m going to write about next.
