As a political science major, one of my primary pet peeves is being told to "educate yourself, sweetie" by people who earned their political science and economics degrees at the elusive College of Social Media. In my personal experience, these people are almost always either biology or musical theater majors, never well-versed in economics or anything beyond basic high school history and civics courses. But they believe watching a couple of mic.com videos and perusing a few blog posts qualify them to lecture on the subject.

As political science majors, we don't typically engage in debates about other topics. But we are equally guilty of this obsession with sharing every opinion popping into our heads.

I've been to a few real-life debates which quickly devolved into shouting matches, but assaults on peoples' intelligence are most likely to happen on social media. For some reason in the social media environment everyone feels qualified to speak and debate on every single topic. Twitter and Facebook are literally just competitions to see who can have the hottest take, but half of y'all's takes aren't actually very hot.

But Kellan, you write for Odyssey and you tweet literally all the time, aren't you guilty of this??

In the interest of full disclosure-- yes, I am equally guilty of oversharing all my opinions. And y'all know I have firm convictions on a pretty wide variety of topics-- not all of them political. I don't think sharing your thoughts on the internet is necessarily a bad thing. Asking questions and engaging in civil debate are definitely not bad things-- in fact, we need more civil discourse and more questions.

But we don't need to constantly compete to have the hottest of the hot takes on every single topic. I refuse to comment on the French elections or write any in-depth analyses of Brexit because I simply do not have the foreign policy knowledge required to do that. Britain and France have both garnered substantive international media attention, and I could probably gain clicks and retweets by writing about them. But I could say literally nothing worthwhile. I can speak and write more intelligently about American politics and education, maybe international issues in some cases, but I cannot speak in depth on every single topic that makes headlines.

Instead of striving for the ultimate hot take on every single prominent issue, we should all strive to find our passions and become fairly knowledgeable about them.