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#143. Common Ground
Shem Opolot
October 17, 2025
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Who am I? I’m Shem Opolot, a health professional turned content creator, passionate about helping people be their best selves in life and work.
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Hi! I'm Shem Opolot, and this is The Friday Fix, my weekly newsletter. If you've received it, you’re either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you. If you fit into the latter (yes, I’m the kind of person who uses words like “latter”) camp and want to subscribe, then click on the shiny button below:
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HAPPY FRIDAY 🎉 This year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature exemplifies expertise at its best: before you can be great at something, you have to learn the rules and follow them religiously. Then, once you’ve mastered the rules, you can—and should—break them. Break them so elegantly and undeniably.
Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s latest novel is an English teacher’s worst nightmare: over 400 pages, Krasznahorkai tells a story in a single sentence, with only one period and several run-on sentences punctuated by commas.
***
RIP to D’Angelo! If you ask me, besides his soulful, genre-bending style, he also invented the thirst trap and maybe even abs? Today’s playlist—in his honor—contains a smattering of his classics, more RnB, and, as usual, a little bit of everything 😊.
LIFE.
Common Ground
I’ve been thinking a lot about arguments and “common ground” recently.
When was the last time you had a “good” argument?
Arguing is much harder on social media.
Social media—and its attendant psychosis—is new. There has never been a time like this. In the past, people were ignorant due to sheer ignorance. The globe and its vast populations were big and largely unexplored, or as a colonizer would say, “undiscovered.”
People constructed their worldviews based on a movie, a book, or a story from their grandfather. But today, the world is literally bigger (we’ve added a couple billion people) and yet, at the same time, smaller than ever, with transport and social media networks connecting us like organs in the body linked by vessels and shrinking the globe to fit in your hand—your phone.
Today, we have access to infinite information, and yet somehow ignorance feels more rampant. And yet we can’t agree on what’s true and what’s not. We can’t agree on a genocide, for God’s sake.
People line up on the social media streets, covered in the war paint and uniforms of the times, armed with their own “research.” Their own evidence. And they yell at each other from either side of the colored line, hoping not to convince the other side of their rightness but to somehow overwhelm them—with noise—into submission.
Rage-baiting algorithmic gods have enslaved us, preying on our short attention spans and fuses, compelling us to engage with clips without context.
We can’t agree. We can’t find common ground.
***
I started one of those Bible-in-a-year reading plans last month, and I’m reading about Job now. If you’re unfamiliar with the Bible, Job could be considered the unluckiest person who ever lived. His life—a stage for the devil and God to settle an argument.
Job’s story is probably the Bible’s best attempt to answer the age-old “Why do bad things happen to good people?” quandary all religions grapple with. After God let the devil test Job’s faith with plagues and plights, Job became so miserable that he begged God to mercy-kill him.
Job’s friends visited him to commiserate, but like typical poor room readers, they couldn’t resist offering solutions. They were convinced his sins caused his suffering, so they prescribed repentance. This frustrated Job, and he reproached his friends but never turned against God.
It was, in fact, a resolute Job who said: “….the Lord giveth, and He taketh away…”
Job disagreed with his friends because they had different worldviews. Job submitted to God absolutely, unwaveringly taking the good with the bad. Job’s friends, however, believed their good actions earned them grace, and therefore sin sired suffering. These views, together, tell a more complete story, but alone, they aren’t wrong; they are just incomplete.
And this is the nature of most disagreement, particularly in the digital age—incomplete worldviews.
Your beliefs are based on your worldview—your lived experience. It’s hard to get someone to believe anything other than something they’ve seen or experienced firsthand. And our worldviews—our experiences stitched together into a quilt of narratives—become the stories we tell ourselves about how the world works.
That’s why some Christians claim morality can’t exist without God. But my atheist friend will tell you they grew up in a community without any organized religion and first encountered bigotry and evil when they encountered “God.”
That’s why you can’t convince people immigrants aren’t taking their jobs if that’s the edge case they’ve seen. Or worse, if that’s the story they need to tell themselves to rationalize their station in life.
We don’t tell ourselves the same stories because no two people live in the same world.
Because of this, I think we're often more obsessed with being right than we need to be. It's important to share your view and listen to other people’s. This is especially clear to me when I write; I realize my view has a counterview, but my view is important still. For example, as I write this, I recall Ta-Nehisi Coates saying, freedom of expression can’t come at the cost of other people’s humanity. And I agree. But contemplating dispelling every counterview while writing is ambitious, arrogant, limiting, and ineffective. Especially if you intend to write a ~500-word newsletter piece.
A counterview is pegged to your view, but there's an entire world out there of views that exist and draw breath untethered to yours. And those views may also be valid.
Often, sharing and listening to views is the point. Not being right.
Hopefully, once in a while, in the marriage of multiple views, we find the unicorn called common ground.
But finding common ground is hard and, at scale, honestly quite boring or even totalitarian. Diversity is built on uncommon ground after all. I challenge you to 1) always assume you’re wrong, because you probably are, and 2) ask yourself where your deeply held beliefs really come from.
THINGS.
A quote.
Living as though the connection between the world and the heart is severable – that my neighbor cannot possibly have an effect on my experience, that I can’t abide any amount of embarrassment, that nobody can say what I don’t want to hear – can make you absolutely crazy, unable to endure normal human life.
An excerpt
A sample of Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s work.
A picture.
Spent some quality time with some new friends and some old friends last weekend to celebrate Uganda’s Independence. Good community will add years to your life.
If you squint, you can see me in the back.
WORK.
Clean up
You have data:
You want to clean it up so that the data fits nicely in the rows and columns.
In Google Sheets, you do this:
1) Click the corner box in the top left corner to highlight the entire sheet, 2) double-click the right-most line of column A, and 3) double-click the bottom line of row 1.
Here are the click points in picture form:
In Excel, use the shortcuts Alt + H, O, I and Alt + H, O, A to autofit the data to column width and row width, respectively.
Done.
Nice, right? You should really take my course ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
FUN.
The Friday Fix playlist
Your picks
> How to throw a good party
> Make any PDF fillable with AI
> Free mental health resources
Have a great weekend,
— Shem
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