Unpopular Opinion
Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
Guidelines:
Tag your post, if possible (not required)
- If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
- If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
view the rest of the comments
I love my car and I'm not ashamed of it. It's true, I don't want to be on a train or in a bus with you (or any other stranger) but I don't think fear is the right word for that. Sometimes there are people on mass transit who do seem like they might be dangerous, but usually everyone is clearly harmless and it's still unpleasant for me to be around them.
I used to think this dislike of being physically close to other people was a human universal but apparently it isn't. The best analogy I can come up with for someone who doesn't share it is that people are like an annoying noise. The more people there are and the closer they are to me, the louder that noise is. Being in a crowded train or bus is like standing near an ambulance with its siren on. It's not scary, and it's not unbearable. I could stand next to that ambulance if I needed to, and sometimes I do. It upsets me, I can deal with being upset, but I'm willing to spend a lot of money (and to pollute the environment) in order to avoid it.
(Even if I always had the entire train or bus to myself, I would still prefer to drive because taking mass transit is usually much slower than driving. But that's a separate issue...)
And I call that selfish.
I'm going to use the "E" word - entitlement. I feel entitled to live the way that I do, because of how important avoiding physical proximity to strangers is for me. I suspect that you consider me to be selfish because being near strangers isn't a big deal for you, not because it is but you do it anyway (or because you make some other, equally large sacrifice).
(Plus, I'm a vegetarian so I have the reassurance that compared to me, everyone who eats meat is a monster. Since I'm pretty much a saint already, I can permit myself a little bit of sin...)