Opinions, Truth, and the Recorder in My Head: How I Form and Evolve What I Believe

When I say “everything runs on opinions,” I’m not trying to be clever. I’m describing how I experience life. My mind is like a recorder that never turns off. It takes in what I see, hear, and feel, stashes it, and keeps processing in the background. Out of that ongoing process come my opinions. They aren’t final decrees carved in stone. They’re the best answers I have right now, given what I’ve seen, lived, and thought through. New inputs can shift them. A quiet rethinking can shift them too, even without new facts. So my opinions are both mine and in motion.

This article lays out the parts of that system that I’m keeping for the “Opinions” piece: the mental pipeline, the uniqueness of each person’s opinion set, the sources of change, the social tangle of truth and trust, and the edge cases that test me. I’m not writing to convince you that I’m right about everything. I’m writing to show you how I work, so you can reflect on how you work too.

1) The mental pipeline I live with

If I had to draw how opinions form for me, the picture is simple:

Senses → Thought → Thinking → Opinion

It starts with inputs. I notice something on the road, a headline, a memory that surfaces. That raw input…