6/13/2026 - Why Critical Thinking Matters

Musing over these past few years I keep noticing that critical thinking seems to be on the decline amongst most people on the internet.
Perhaps I could make a point that since a lot of movements came up, it seems to be that more and more people expect you to take a side
on certain issues and the victim mentality keeps being present in real life.

Yet… admittingly watching this graduation speech from Noah Eckstein in particular reminded me of why exactly critical thinking still matters in today’s society.


The thing is, as controversial as his stance is, Noah points out that in his background that he has come from bloodlines of diverse religions.
He’s correct in saying that you need to seek understanding from other people and listen as you may be wrong if you wish to bridge divides
Not forcing agreement. This is something I touched on in my last article talking about Kirk, but not to this level of detail.

Here’s my perspective, a very long time ago when I was in art school in 2016… arguably a bigger meme now than it should be, but bear with the title there:
I had a professor once in Screen Writing who happened to know comedic writing, Molly. Now, she was more of an old school Democrat,
she had a lot of criticisms concerning where the Democratic party was heading and had a few stories about why she felt that too many people leaned into victim mentality over the smallest things.
This is also considering she’s a New Yorker so her mentality is set on getting the work done and going about her day, it’s also goes without saying that most New Yorkers tend to have a chip on their shoulder.

Needless to say, this was around the 2016 election. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have been running and admittingly, at the time I made my decision not to vote for either of them
purely because I could see where neither candidate was fit to be President given Hillary herself was responsible for advocating for war and, like other Democrats at the time, had a tendency to sweep issues under the rug.
Donald Trump, who I did not like because it was clear that he didn’t seem to be presidential material and said a lot of things that rubbed me the wrong way.
Some things required nuance that I didn’t have at the time, but other things where he made remarks about PoWs when criticizing McCain rubbed me the wrong way since my grandfather was a PoW in WW2 when he was fighting on the European front.
Needless to say, the choice not to vote ended up putting me in the crosshairs of a lot of my peers who wanted me to vote Hillary.

Molly did vote for Hillary and mentioned it in the class, but she also said one thing to the students right away. “You know, I’m voting for Hillary but I have no clue what’s going to happen.”
And that line struck because in hindsight that really should have foreshadowed what she was really thinking at the time about what she really felt about Hillary.
Needless to say, Hillary did not win and as much as the emotional impact hit and I thought I had a mistake, I was shamed about it…
but my rational mind was also thinking “Drew, why on earth are you surprised by this?”

Throughout that whole week, everyone was feeling the disappointment and frustration upon Trump’s win. Even the majority of the professors…

Not Molly however.

In fact in the Friday of the week the election results came out, she really had to get her thoughts out to the class that she knew that Trump was likely going to win
because of one thing society did not understand at that point, the fact that there is an expectation where people are supposed to take sides.

Her biggest criticism toward Hillary was that her entire campaign was run at face value and she relied too much on the fact that she was a woman.
The other thing that she also wasn’t afraid to point out that it’s also partly on people too because they think that pressuring other people who may disagree with them to their stance is going to get them to their side
when all it’s really going to do is cause the other person to say “No, fuck you” while digging their heels in their stance before turning around to walk away.

The week after her and I had a conversation and I told her my experiences the past couple of weeks leading up to that point, and she noted that I had some common sense
just because I didn’t just blindly vote for Hillary and there were a couple of things that her and I agreed on in that conversation concerning why I didn’t vote Hillary,
but the one thing I still walked away with is that she told me that it’s really my prerogative to have that stance and I shouldn’t have to feel ashamed to have that.

So why is this story important? Well, needless to say in 2020 I voted Biden and putting aside all the silly things Trump was doing leading up to January 6th
Biden did a lot of the things I was expecting him to do between mishandling the student loan crisis and hastily pulling troops out of the middle east,
leading to perhaps one of the more disappointing votes I have ever made at that time.

But my conscious couldn’t allow me to vote for Trump at the time, and it was the same story when it came to 2024 where I felt that Biden shouldn’t have run
Needless to say, I did actually vote for Kamala when she came in despite the fact I knew it was likely going to be the losing vote, but had Biden continued to run,
I would have repeated the decision I had made in 2016 not to vote for President. For the senators and representatives perhaps, but not the President.

2024 eerily reminded me of 2016 because not only was the exact mistake of people voting because “It’s not Trump” was being made,
and it wasn’t just because Kamala happened to be a woman. . It was because of the fact that the Democrats were still running with face value campaigns and to add more problems into the mix,
the fact that Kamala never won a primary made it feel like that the Democrats subtly made a mistake where Biden passing the torch to Kamala was a succession line,
something frowned upon by many Americans on grounds that we don’t want something akin to a monarchy.

This is where critical thinking should have come in for Democrats at this time.

This is not just an issue exclusive to political issues, but this also extends into moral issues as well.
The biggest example might be the fact that Jonny Depp was ostracized by Hollywood Studios because of her marital dispute with Amber Herd, yet even though at the end of the day those are really just two celebrities who aren’t good people,
both the court systems between the UK and the US ruled that Jonny Depp was innocent in all this and something happened that shook movements like #MeToo to the point where they lost support, the possibility that a woman can in fact be lying about what happens in a domestic issue.

On that note, is it really a public matter at that point if an individual decides to either drop the case or if a judge decides to dismiss the case?
One thing that proves to be true from that question is that the court of public opinion does not matter once a case is decided on.
Doesn’t mean you have to like the guy who was proven innocent, but it does mean that your opinion won’t have an impact on their legacy if the court decides against the accuser.

Dave Chappelle also warned that anger was not going to be the right way to be tackling issues concerning sexual harassment or violence, and that was a level of foreshadowing that almost predicted the Roe vs. Wade would be overturned.
Yet, many people who supported #MeToo still did not learn that lesson, and the same thing is happening with other movements on social issues and even other issues with where tech is going.


And now the average women in their 20's or early 30's wonder why men pretty much gave up on dating. But I digress, since call out culture and cancel culture are only just small portions of what the issue is.

So here is where I am going with this.

The fact that people are quick to take sides and try to force people who disagree with them into agreeing with them, especially on the internet mind you where a lot of the political discussion takes place is not the way to go about discussion.
You cannot shame someone into agreeing with you, and you can’t always silence the opinions you disagree with. You have to chear those opinions head on, listen to people objectively before you challenge their opinion on why they might be wrong.
Failing to do that much will end up causing the opposite of what you wish to accomplish instead of changing someone’s opinion.

Needless to say, in an era where Ai and Algorithms tend to take over the platforms and it’s easy for people to try and villainize the other people who they don’t agree with, even to the point where slander becomes a tool of someone who either loses a debate or has nothing of substance to say,
then it is only reasonable to assume that the majority of opinions expressed on social media are performative and do not have to be taken seriously, no matter how much the other person who is screaming into the void from their screen thinking they changed your mind is thinking they’re doing something of importance.
(Which, by the way is also why I decided to give up on trying to be politically correct, because it’s more tiring to do that than to be honest)

You could ignore them, but it’s also a lot more fun to mock them and their intelligence in accordance with rules 11-14 of the internet when you realize that you don’t have to debate people all the time.
But I’ll say this, if you take this route just because you disagree with someone’s opinion, then don’t be surprised if they give you a taste of your own medicine. If you can’t take what you dish out then you probably shouldn’t be trying to debate on the internet in my honest opinion.

For your mental health, on a serious note, you should be skeptical of everything.
Even if you don’t agree with someone’s saying, don’t just follow popular opinion no matter how much pressure you get.
You might get hated for it, but realistically, you’re not going to get everyone to agree with you.

Even I have to realize not everyone is gonna read or hear what I have to say online or in real life anyway, but for those who do, thank you for your time.