Changing Your Mind Shouldn’t Be This Embarrassing

At some point, a change of mind made you look untrustworthy.

We call it hypocrisy. Backpedaling. Flip-flopping. Getting exposed. The internet has receipts, and God help you if something you said in 2017 contradicts something you believe in 2026.

Which is a little strange, considering the alternative is apparently going through your entire adult life without learning a goddamn thing.

There are, of course, legitimate reasons to care when someone suddenly changes their position. Politicians discover new moral convictions suspiciously close to election season. Companies unveil heartfelt commitments to social justice right around the time their marketing department realizes people are mad at them. Public figures regularly apologize in the linguistic equivalent of a hostage video.

People lie. People dodge accountability. People reinvent their beliefs when doing so becomes profitable.

I am not talking about that. I am talking about the strange cultural expectation that a decent person should somehow arrive at adulthood with a complete set of correct opinions and then preserve them in amber until death.

We seem deeply suspicious of anyone who says, “I used to think this. Then I learned something. Now I think something else.” Which is unfortunate, because that is basically the entire mechanism of growth.

You are supposed to be wrong sometimes. Preferably about fewer things as you get older, sure. But still wrong.

I have changed my mind about people. About relationships. About what makes someone strong. About what forgiveness means. About what I owe other people and what they owe me. About things I once thought were moral absolutes and now think are much messier than that.

There are versions of me from ten years ago who would probably find current me confusing.

Good. That guy was doing his best with the information he had, but he was also, scientifically speaking, kind of an idiot. I assume current me will eventually suffer the same fate.

That should be comforting.

Instead, we have built an online culture where changing your mind can feel less like growth and more like leaving evidence at a crime scene.

Everything is permanent.

An old tweet. A Facebook post from college. A terrible joke. A confident opinion you formed after reading approximately one headline and half a Reddit comment.

Congratulations. It lives forever now.

Someone can pull it up years later and present it beside your current beliefs as if they have uncovered the Watergate tapes.

“Interesting,” they say. “Because in 2018 you said…”

Yes.

In 2018, I also thought buying furniture from IKEA without measuring the room first was a reasonable adult decision.

People evolve. The internet does not. It preserves us in layers. There is a teenager you. Twenty-two-year-old you. Angry you. Scared you. Newly political you. Recently heartbroken you. Trying-too-hard-to-be-funny you. You after three beers and before anyone taught you that every thought does not need to become a public statement.

All standing beside each other in the same searchable archive. That is historically bizarre.

Throughout most of human existence, people could quietly outgrow themselves. You could say something stupid at dinner in 1994 and, with any luck, everyone eventually forgot. Now somebody could theoretically screen-record your ideological adolescence. And because we know that, we start performing consistency.

We defend positions longer than we should because admitting we were wrong feels humiliating. We double down. We moved the goalposts. We find increasingly elaborate ways to explain why we technically never believed the thing everyone clearly remembers us believing.

And sometimes we identify so strongly with an opinion that changing it feels like losing part of ourselves.

We do not simply believe things anymore. We become people who believe things. I am the kind of person who supports this. I would never have thought that.

People like me believe this. People like them believe that.

Once an opinion becomes part of your identity, evidence has a much harder job. Changing your mind no longer means adjusting your understanding of an issue.

It means betraying your team.

That is how we end up with people arguing positions they barely seem to believe anymore because surrender would be socially worse than being wrong.

And the internet rewards them for it. Certainty performs beautifully online. Nuance is terrible content.

“I have complicated feelings about this and would like more information,” does not exactly set the algorithm on fire.

But certainty? Certainty sells.

This person is evil. That person is good. This idea is dangerous. That idea is obvious.

Here is the correct opinion, available now in fourteen slides with aesthetically pleasing fonts.

We increasingly encounter complicated subjects through people whose entire job is to sound completely sure about them. Then the rest of us absorb the lesson.

Confidence becomes intelligence. Consistency becomes integrity. Changing your mind becomes a weakness.

The weird thing is that we claim to want people to grow. We tell people to educate themselves.

Listen. Learn. Do better.

But when somebody actually does those things and arrives somewhere different, we often respond by dragging out proof of who they used to be.

Imagine telling someone for years that they need to change, then mocking them because they changed. What exactly was the desired outcome here? Were they supposed to achieve moral improvement while maintaining perfect ideological continuity?

Growth leaves contradictions behind. If I am exactly the same person at forty that I was at twenty, somebody should probably check on me.

I want future versions of myself to disagree with me. I hope they do. I hope fifty-year-old me looks back at something I am completely certain about right now and says, “Buddy. You were trying, but absolutely not.”

Because that would mean something happened between here and there.

I met someone. I read something. I screwed something up. I listened. I experienced something I could not understand from a distance. I learned.

And I changed.

None of this means every reversal deserves applause. Changing your mind does not erase the harm you caused while believing the old thing. Growth does not automatically entitle you to forgiveness. And there is a meaningful difference between evolving and conveniently rewriting your own history.

You should still be able to say, “Yes, I believed that.” You should be able to sit beside the uncomfortable older version of yourself without pretending they never existed. Accountability and growth are supposed to work together.

Instead, we often treat them like opposites. Either you defend who you were forever, or you renounce them so completely that you pretend they were another person.

But you were there. You said that thing. You believed the thing.

And then something changed. That is not necessarily hypocrisy. Sometimes it is evidence. Evidence that life got through to you.

I think we could use a culture that makes a little more room for saying, “I was wrong.” Not the theatrical version. Not the Notes-app apology crafted by six publicists.

The ordinary version. The embarrassing version.

The one where you have to admit that someone you argued with three years ago may have had a point and you would now very much like the universe to destroy all documentation of the conversation.

The version where your pride takes a minor injury. Because being wrong should occasionally cost us something. It just should not cost us the right to become wiser.

Maybe we would all be a little less defensive if changing our minds did not feel like confessing to fraud. Maybe we would listen differently. Maybe conversations would become less about winning and more about discovering whether there is anything worth taking home with us. Maybe we would stop asking whether someone has been perfectly consistent and start asking a more interesting question.

What changed? Because sometimes the answer is cowardice.

Sometimes it is convenience. Sometimes it is money.

But sometimes the answer is that a human being encountered something their old worldview could not survive.

So yes, somewhere out there is probably an old version of you who believed something you now find ridiculous.

Leave them there. Thank them for getting you this far. Cringe a little. Then keep going.

You are allowed to know better now. And if we are lucky, someday we will know better than we do today.