I recognise myself to be very contrarian, to the point of reacting in this fashion in every situation, regardless of what it is. How can I change this?
Eleanor says: It sounds as though there’s a gap between what you want to do and what you do. You can see you’re being contrarian, you want to change that, but that’s not enough to mean things actually change.
Generally in that situation – whatever it is – you have a couple of routes available.
One is to focus on how changing might make things nicer for the people you care about. Just kicking yourself into motivation doesn’t always work. Focusing on other people can succeed where trying to improve ourselves has failed. Can you think of particular people affected by this habit; ways their lives would be better without it? What’s it like for them to be near this?
At its extremes, contrarianism can make people feel stupid for nearly everything they say. It can jack up the costs of venturing an opinion or making a suggestion so much that the people around you just stop trying. If every way of engaging with you leads to conflict or defensiveness, people can feel defeated from the jump – pre-emptively scrutinised and criticised to the extent it’s not worth having views or tastes of their own. This is a good way to give the people around you a complex. It can communicate that you think it’s unlikely they’d say something true or propose something insightful.
I know contrarianism can be an enjoyable mental exercise. It’s tremendous fun to find relationships where you can take ideas for a walk and it’s a relief to have relationships where divergent views or preferences don’t automatically count as conflict. But there’s a huge difference between sincere disagreement and just negating for negation’s sake. When you negate people all the time, they will (rightly) suspect that you’re not motivated by any kind of sincere view about the topic at hand– but by an interpersonal need to push back against people. Lots of people will feel defeated and squashed by this or unable to express how annoying it is when you then take refuge in “just asking questions”.
So maybe thinking about others, not yourself, might help – including in the ways they don’t tell you about because they don’t want to be contradicted in that conversation, too.
Last, like all habits we want to change or virtues we want to cultivate, it might help to start very concrete and very small. Could you make it a goal to have just one conversation a week where you learn something from someone that you don’t already know? That might help you feel what it’s like to inhabit a different, non-contrarian posture.
Normally when we’re learning from people we ask questions, we see them as potentially credible and interesting, as capable of helping us. These are nicer ways to be seen than as a vector of possible falsehood. Rather than scanning for ways to disagree, perhaps shifting your focus to what other people can teach you is a good place to start.