Personally I used to always hope for conversations and other interlocutions with folk having a very different mindset. I confess that this was mostly for its entertainment value, as I like to tease the daft (and even the merely incautious with their opinions) whilst rehearsing, practicing and refining my own "positions". An excellent side effect was that I'd often get reverse-teased and end up changing my mind - always an exciting experience, as all we who were teenagers in the 60s will know. (Well, we will if we chewed the blotting paper).
But of late I find it much harder to do that. Is it the onset of age and a general ossification, even of the synaptic arrangements? Possibly. But another factor is that our "individualistic" society and culture has become so diffuse, so full of attitudes, opinions and (worst of all) behaviours that I find less than amusing that I can no longer keep my good humour when discussing various things with others who have somehow become alien rather then merely different.
The test is really to ask: how much serious damage is their opinion and consequent behaviour doing to others. Once it was easy to accept those with different political, religious or even behavioural views as they were essentially harmless, being far less likely to be translated into damaging behaviours. But now? Unsocial media, rabid consumerism and the hollowing out of various moral "systems" into nothing more than extremist dogmas has set free the beast in a lot of folk. I don't like them. I avoid them. They seem dangerous. I never had to say that until relatively recently.
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But perhaps we're all huddling in our bubbles as the world has become so much more frightening in general? Naw, I'm probably just transmogrified by getting past 70, like them ole gits I used to mock when I was a lad, so long ago.
Cugel
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”.
John Maynard Keynes