The “must have a take” problem

My man Nate Guggia wrote this on FOMO and hot takes recently. It’s pretty solid. Near the end, he defines out two “primary” camps of current online discourse. To wit:

• A large group with self-imposed FOMO who aren’t motivated to properly educate themselves on a “topic of the day”, but suffer the psychological pressure to participate. (Psst…it’s ok to not care about everything.)
• A much smaller and much louder group of people who aren’t fully educated on [pick any given topic] but think they have an informed opinion and shout half-truths from the rooftops.

This is absolutely true and accurate. You see it every day, whether it’s about hiring, what we should teach kids, abortion, diet, exercise, etc, etc. There is a deep compulsion for people to have takes, because without takes it feels like you’re on the outside looking in — and although at the corporate level we’ve ascribed “belonging” as a HR thing (which makes it meaningless), the sheer reality of human existence is that belonging makes quite a lot. I dated (loose term) a hospice nurse for a few months at 28, and I can tell you that all she talked about was people about to die wanting to have belonged to something — family, friends, etc. The financial stuff barely mattered to them as they passed away. It was about belonging.