[giltleaf]

Really enjoyed this. I'd often get in political and fiscal discussions with my friends and found that it just really wouldn't click with some people. They'd get mad and things would get personal (I can get pretty defensive myself). The realization that "When you attack someone’s opinion, you attack their identity" was huge for me.

People have different values of associations with different opinions, and while it's a shame I can't discuss things like international development issues with some friends because they hold their opinions about that too close to their personality, it has helped me to start looking out for bad conversation paths.

However, as the top comment on reddit says: "They're still my friends, but I just don't ever have any actual proper conversations with those ones - we instead just have boring conversations about cheese or something."