Nothing changes like a mind
I used to admire thinkers who maintained their ideological stances. Authors like Sam Harris who still today maintain the opinions they published decades ago. Politicians like Bernie Sanders who have held unwavering policies throughout their careers. Thinkers like Noam Chomsky that were espousing the same views in the nineties as they are in the twenty-twenties. I didn’t always agree with them, but I admired their consistency. It seemed honourable. Now my view is more nuanced. I’ve changed my mind.
I recently started writing again. This was a prolific undertaking when I was younger, born more of necessity than anything else. I wrote for a living. Literally.
As a communications consultant I had to produce opinion pieces, press releases, and other collateral for the clients I worked with. I - shit you not - had to come up with thousand-word pieces about printers for one company that contracted my services. Nothing, and I mean nothing, will test your creative resolve more than having to come up with fresh hyperbole for the most hated invention in human history. One that exists for the sole purpose of creating images on paper, and does so badly. But I had mouths to feed, and the printer company had money from fleecing people for ink and toner. And so I wrote about WiFi-connected printing as if it were the next iPhone.
As a journalist I had weekly deadlines. Writer’s block was not compatible with the schedules of editors that had to provide printers with copy at midnight every Thursday. Don’t have any ideas? Well you’ve got two fucking hours to find some inspiration, or your precious column space goes to one of the other thousand aspirants waiting to fill it. So wipe those tears and summon your muses.
Later I was approached by a publisher to write a book. I loved the process and filled it with my own ideas, but the spark for its creation didn’t come from me. My second book was the brainchild of the brilliant coauthor who approached me with it. By all measures a success - but not my idea either.
Looking back over thousands of blog posts, columns, releases, books, and other pieces, I find many opinions, ideas, and positions that I no longer maintain. The thing about a book is that you can’t log into it and make changes. Once it’s out there, it’s immutable. People will read it years later and judge you as the author even if your mind has changed. You’re expected to still hold the same opinions even though you, and the world around you, have moved on. This is where fiction is the ultimate liberator. That’s not what I wrote.
But the most impressive thinkers in the world are those that change their minds. They’ve overcome the most powerful force in the universe: cognitive dissonance.
It’s also the thing that is easiest to spot in others while being almost undetectable in your own mind. It’s incredible watching even some of the most coherent intellectuals like Sam Harris accurately maintain the separation between ideology and adherents when discussing Islam, and then failing to maintain that divide when discussing Jews and the actions of the Israeli state, in the next breath.
I no longer admire those that stick to their views, per se. It should go without saying that correct views must be maintained. Someone like Richard Dawkins is most admirable in this regard. He clings to his published views because nothing in the sciences has refuted them yet. For the few things where he was wrong, he has acknowledged it.
On the flipside of the intellectual coin is someone like Elon Musk who puts seemingly no thought into his expressions. The man spouts ideas like a broken sewer pipe. His detractors can’t keep up with his myriad incorrect predictions because they’re too busy critiquing his current claims of cities on Mars and heat sinks the size of oil tankers to cool his AI data centres in space. He either doesn’t acknowledge ever being wrong, or doesn’t care. I’m not sure which of those realities is scarier.
Great thinking, like great science, is open to change. It evolves. It admits to being incorrect. It doesn’t present unfalsifiable hypotheses in the way that religion, pseudoscience, and other deceptions do. It changes, and matures. It almost never makes predictions, because no one can with credibility.
I did most of my writing at a young age. I was immature, and just plain stupid in some departments. Sometimes I was just plain wrong.
I hate advertising, and predicted that subscription services would reduce its presence online. Boy was I wrong about that (unfortunately). I was early to Bitcoin and ignorant of economics, thinking that blockchain would have a more positive impact than it has. I was too strident in my critique of corporate culture, too sweary in all my takes, and came across as blunt and sometimes arrogant.
I used to cringe looking back at things I wrote. But now I’m proud. Not because I was right in my thinking, but because I’ve changed my mind. I used to delete the posts that I no longer agreed with. Now I leave them be, so that I can point to them as examples of where I got it wrong. It’s humbling to be reminded of what an arse you used to be.
There’s a gap in my writing of almost a decade. I burned out, creatively. I no longer felt that I had anything to offer. I had fatigue from the physical act of writing, and shame from the ideas that I had put out into the world that I no longer hold. One piece of hate mail too much had pushed me over the edge and having a business barely in survival mode was an overwhelming distraction, even when it wasn’t.
But now I’m back. Hopefully wrong about less. I’ve also learned that writing serves little purpose if it isn’t posted somewhere. Part of the practice is attracting critique. Is going, “Fuck it. This isn’t done and I’m not sure even I like it, but I’m putting it out there anyway.”
It’s also about letting go of Why. You’ll drive yourself crazy trying to justify the act of thinking out loud and sharing ideas. I know, because I have. You like writing? Great. Do it. And share it. And fuck the haters who have contributed so little in their lives that they have enough time to send you hate mail.
Ideas only transform out in the open. Markdown files in the darkness of an Obsidian vault do nothing for the minds of anyone, even their own authors. I’ve made many mistakes over the last ten years, and one of them was giving in to the fatigue, the criticism, and the shame. Time to change that too.