Most of My Opinions Are Probably Wrong

And, so are yours. But, that's okay.

Have you ever left a voicemail for a friend, and then they proceeded to wait until they’re in your presence to listen to it? Maybe you’re the exception, but if you’re like anyone I’ve ever met, you hate that feeling of listening to your own voice. “Do I actually sound like that?? No way,” we think to ourselves.

Now, take that feeling, but imagine your voicemails were all published for anyone to listen to, and try listening to them four years later. I think “cringe” is perhaps the best way to describe this feeling. Having been publishing thoughts and opinions here on this publicly-available Substack page for nearly four years now, I think that’s a similar feeling to what I experience when I scroll back in the archives here. My opinions on many things have evolved, and certainly the ways I would articulate those opinions have changed. Yet, I believe there’s also some beauty in seeing the raw version of how we used to think and express ourselves. And, when we open our hearts to it, I believe it can bring a helpful level of humility to the way we express our opinions now.

In the spirit of this humility, and after some interesting reflections recently which have brought to mind posts I wrote several years ago, I’m launching a little series of sorts. We could call it generically “From The Archives,” or, maybe more accurately, “I Used To Be Wrong, And Hopefully Now I’m A Little Less Wrong,” or something like that. I’ll be pulling posts I wrote in the past—back when I called this venture Embracing Complexity and wrote about what I saw to be false dichotomies—and sharing a new take on those thoughts. Sometimes I’ll agree with myself, but often I’ll share how my thinking has changed.

Through this practice, I hope to accomplish a few things:

• Remind us all of the fact that it’s entirely natural, good, even, for our opinions to evolve over the years. To be very blunt: if you haven’t changed any of your opinions over time, you either aren’t growing up, aren’t paying attention to the world around you, or have far too much pride.

• Remind myself to have more humility in what I write, now, knowing I’ll likely come back to it in 3-4 years and notice all kinds of flaws in my thinking.

• Share some of the lessons my younger self learned that still have application to life now, with some updated takes here and there.

I often sense that today’s world gives little grace for folks who evolve their opinions over time, and I’m disappointed by this type of thinking. If we’re living life right, it should be full of exposure to new data about how the world and the people around us operate, and that new data should be continuously informing us to tweak our priors. Even scientists know we get things wrong and make changes to their theories over time as technology improves. Remember learning about the pudding model of atomic structure in high school science class? And then learning it wasn’t actually correct, but it was still a step in the right direction? I believe this illustrates, in some sense, how we’re supposed to live our lives: always open to updating our beliefs and ideas about the world, knowing we’re always going to be a little bit wrong, but with the optimism that we’re heading in the right direction.

So, whether you’ve been here since the beginning or this will be your first exposure to the Embracing Complexity days, I hope you’ll join me in these next few weeks of resurfacing the proverbial four-year-old voicemails. It might be just a tad cringe, but I think you and I both will find some new appreciation for how far we’ve come.

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Journal Prompt of the Week

What’s an opinion you held several years ago that’s changed? Why has it changed?