Most of us never notice the moment we stop thinking for ourselves. It happens quietly, in the gap between someone else’s opinion and our response to it. A coworker might say they dislike the governor, and we find ourselves saying the opposite. Maybe we have evaluated the governor independently, but maybe we have only positioned ourselves relative to this other person’s view. In this case, we may have taken the position that we actually like the governor when we merely do not dislike the governor as vehemently as our colleague, or for the same reasons.
This is reactive positioning, and it may shape more of our identities than many of us realize. We sometimes think we are expressing ourselves when often, we are simply inverting someone else’s point of view.
The modern information environment has turned this tendency into a crisis for some people. Social media and cable news are engineered for reaction. The most inflammatory content, outrageous claims, and emotionally charged stories, generate the most engagement and travel the furthest, despite usually being far from the closest version of reality. People invest enormous emotional energy defending against threats that exist primarily as unlikely possibilities for them, taking strong positions on things that have little bearing on their actual lives. In doing so, they drift further from the questions that actually matter:
What do I genuinely believe?
Is this affecting my local community?
What can I do about it?
Why does this matter to me?
Imagine you are the sun at the center of your own solar system.
Everything in your life orbits around you to some degree: your community, your relationships, your work, etc., and each exerts some force on you depending on the influence it has on your life. This is the nature of living among other people. You exist in a field of gravitational pulls, and so does everyone else. The question is whether your own gravity is strong enough to remain the dominant force in your system.
A sun with sufficient mass holds its planets in orbit. The planets do not pull the sun out of equilibrium. They circle it, are shaped by it and are oriented around it. The sun wobbles slightly from the tug of each orbiting body as it maintains the balance of the system it anchors. But a sun without sufficient mass loses its place at the center. It gets pulled by every passing object, slowly dragged into deep space until it is no longer the center of anything at all. The planets, comets, and moons that once orbited faithfully begin to veer off course.
Your principles are what hold you in place when you feel the pull of emotions on your values and positions. Not the values you inherited without scrutiny, and not the positions you adopted because someone else took the opposite one, but the beliefs you have genuinely examined, chosen, and practiced until they are yours. These are what give you gravitational density. They allow you to move through a world full of noise and provocation without being pulled off center every time a strong opinion comes within range.
But knowing your principles is only half the work. The other half is catching yourself in the moment before you respond, before you post, before you take a position that is not really yours. Wisdom suggests that our thoughts should pass through filters before they become speech. I think reactions deserve a similar test before they become actions.
Three questions to ask before allowing a reaction to manifest.
Is this relevant to my reality?
Does this go against any of my core principles, responsibilities, or the people I care about? Is this affecting my local community? If it is not, why has it captured my attention? That does not mean distant events are unimportant. It simply means attention is limited and every moment spent orbiting someone else’s priorities is a moment unavailable for your own.
Am I the sun here, or is someone else?
Am I responding from my own convictions, or am I reacting to someone else’s? Would I hold this position if nobody had challenged me? Would I care about this issue if I had encountered it in silence rather than through an argument? If the answer is no, it may be worth asking whether this conviction belongs to you at all. If you are not generating the gravity that is influencing your actions, what influence is it having on the things you influence?
Can I do anything about it?
Do I have agency here? Can I act, contribute, build, support, improve, teach, protect, or otherwise add anything? Or am I simply reacting? Reaction without action changes very little. It consumes attention, energy, and emotional awareness while producing little of value in return. Some convictions can move us deeply. But if we never stay still long enough to understand what we believe, how can we ever know who we are?
The trap is easy to fall into because what feels like engagement is often times only reaction. But with practice, we can learn to recognize the difference and to distinguish between a belief that emerges from our own principles and a position that exists only because someone else took the opposite one.
Every sun exhibits a healthy wobble to maintain equilibrium within its system. Life may be like that. We are influenced by everyone around us, and we react because we are human. We gloat. We pout. We posture. We exaggerate. We suffer. We question ourselves. We even question our principles and that’s okay. But when we lose sight of who we are at our center, we may start to notice that the things close to us begin to drift away as well.