Maybe it is time to have fewer opinions
Your opinions determine who you are and who you will be. This is not a revolutionary realization, but it is a crucial notion to have around.
In the meaning I’m trying to convey here, opinions are any formed judgment you might hold about reality. A value you attribute to something, usually taken from a pool of other possible ones. It goes from “I like broccoli” to “I am Christian.”
At first glance, the statement sounds like a tautology: the present is always a necessary condition to the future, so inevitably, what I am, say, and do now will determine what I will be, say and do in the future. But the relationship between opinions and your future is a more intimate one.
A general idea of how this relationship unfolds has been running through my mind for a while. Still, I couldn’t frame it in an intelligible way until I looked at it through the lenses of the Narrative Theory of Personality. Or, to better put it, through the overly-simplified filtered version I, a humble, curious mind, made of it.
Our self stories
The Narrative Theory of Personality is a psychology theory that postulates that we build our identity by constructing an actual story of ourselves. We put…