Changing My Mind

Three Things #123: June 9, 2024

Changing your mind is hard. We are social creatures and it often means going against the crowd. It can feel like being on trial.

Changing your mind is hard—it’s scientifically proven to be hard. Our thoughts and worldviews are deeply tied to our identity and sense of self. We cling to ideas as we do to our self-image, often valuing how they make us feel over factual accuracy. This means that changing your mind isn't just about adopting a new perspective—it's about letting go of a part of who you are. And yes, research shows the associated cognitive dissonance can be painful.

I’m pretty stubborn and don’t change my mind easily. Yet, I know it’s crucial to update my beliefs and accept new information when I’m wrong or have misunderstood something. I often see how much better the world could be if more people were willing to change their minds. So, in the spirit of growth and openness, here are some things I’ve changed my mind about.

Thing #1: Health 🍎

“The greatest wealth is health.” – Virgil

For most of my life, I was pretty unhealthy. I didn’t sleep enough, drank too much, avoided physical exercise, hated the gym, and had a terrible diet. In your twenties, you can get away with this lifestyle without paying too severe a price. By your thirties, you need at least one aspect of your health in check—either a great diet or physical fitness. In my thirties, I finally started caring about my health, beginning with my diet.

There wasn’t a single moment or reason for this change. It was the result of accumulating new evidence. I grew up believing “breakfast is the most important meal of the day” and following the original food pyramid, which emphasized carbs and limited meat and fat.

As a teenager, I was obsessed with carbs—sugary sodas, bags of chips, big bowls of cereal, bagels, and huge glasses of orange juice (which is mostly just sugar). I never questioned these habits because they were ingrained in me and I liked them.

When I decide to change, I push myself to the limits. In my thirties, I experimented with vegetarianism, veganism, cutting alcohol and caffeine, and even a year without added sugar (by far the hardest). I replaced juice with water, chips with high-protein snacks like nuts, and unhealthy meals with meal replacements like Soylent. I started skipping breakfast and experimenting with intermittent fasting. Over time, I learned that hunger isn’t something to fear and that a healthy person can go days without food. Friends’ stories of intense fasting reinforced this idea.

My diet is still evolving. This year, I’ve increased my protein intake due to strength training, through supplements and whole foods. I’m also trying to cut back on cholesterol, particularly fried foods, cheese, and red meat.

Even more crucially, I began a habit of daily exercise. This started gradually—I began running occasionally, and although I hated it at first, over time I grew to love it. Running became part of my daily routine and identity. I started running marathons and added cross-training like yoga and light strength training. Last year, I challenged myself to work out every single day, an experience I’ve written about.

Like diet, I hadn’t thought much about physical fitness before. I didn’t come from an athletic background—my parents, never athletic themselves, were academically oriented and taught me to hone my mind, not my body. When the other kids in the school yard played sports, kicking a ball around, I was always the kid in the corner, reading alone.

I eventually realized that real mental acuity and focus, not to mention social health, requires physical wellbeing. The more I ran and exercised, the better I felt overall, the more energy and stamina I had, and the more productive I became. This was a groundbreaking revelation for me, and over time I’ve reorganized my life to prioritize health, fitness, and wellbeing, starting with a workout every morning.

Changing my approach to health has been one of the most important shifts in my life. I still have a long way to go, but I’m on the right path. My motivation now is even stronger: I want to stay healthy for many years to be around for my son.

Thing #2: Liberal 🗽

“The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.” – John Maynard Keynes

I used to proudly consider myself a left-leaning liberal. To me, this meant being on the right side of history—embracing progress, technology, and change for the better. It meant standing up for individual rights, including women’s rights, minority rights, and indigenous rights. Having grown up on welfare myself, I believed in the importance of welfare and giving people a helping hand.

Today, I struggle with this aspect of my identity. While my core values remain unchanged—I still believe in helping others and in individual rights—my overall value system has evolved. I now see the need to balance these values with others that are equally important, such as personal responsibility and the value of hard work. It’s as if the original structure remains but a bigger, grander structure has grown up around it.

During the pandemic, I witnessed firsthand how many people took advantage of unemployment benefits when eligibility requirements were eased. I saw young, healthy individuals choosing not to work and instead collecting benefits. This may be an extreme case of broken, poorly designed incentives (some people in fact received more in benefits than they would’ve earned working), but I’ve seen lots of other, less extreme cases of people underreporting income in order to claim similar benefits.

People need a helping hand from time to time. But people also respond to incentives, and if we want a society that values hard work and contribution, we must be thoughtful about how, when, and to whom we provide assistance. Similarly, I believe forgiving student debt is problematic—it’s inherently unfair and incentivizes fields that don’t generate much social value. Public housing presents an even bigger issue.

As I’ve grown older and become a parent, I’ve realized that individual rights, while crucial, must be weighed against the broader social picture. What benefits an individual at one moment might not benefit society, family, community, or even that same individual later. Thus, individual rights and freedoms must be balanced with these realities.

Consider a contrived example: VR technology becomes so advanced that people prefer living in virtual worlds over real life, neglecting work and family. This behavior, while individually enjoyable, is selfish, antisocial, and ultimately destructive. Without some restrictions on individual behavior for society’s sake, society itself could cease to exist.

This extreme scenario is, to some extent, already starting to happen. During a recent trip to Korea, I saw the direction modern liberal society is heading. Korea, with the world’s lowest birthrate, offers all the pleasures of modern, liberal, cosmopolitan life but at the cost of family and meaningful relationships. Downtown Seoul is vibrant with malls, entertainment centers, and fine dining, yet people increasingly forgo families and romantic relationships.

This trend is mirrored in places like San Francisco, which is also suffering due to more extreme, destructive liberal policies like decriminalizing drug offenses and shoplifting, and offering free or subsidized housing to addicts. Seeing these outcomes has shifted my perspective, and I see now that liberal policies aren’t always the right choice. It’s now clear to me that left-leaning policies can be misguided and harmful, and as with most things, the right path forward is a middle path that steers between extremes and isn’t afraid to tackle hard problems head-on (rather than kicking the can down the proverbial road).

I don’t have all the answers and don’t know how to reconcile modern freedoms with the need to revitalize institutions like family and community. Capitalism, despite its flaws, is the only economic system that somewhat works for most people, but it also turns citizens into consumers and atomizes them, removing them from traditional structures like family and community, which troubles me deeply. I don’t believe that capitalism and a healthy society are fundamentally at odds, but we have to figure out how to make them more compatible.

I’ve also changed my view on government. Once neutral, I now see how bloated and inefficient the federal government has become. Government should be small, local, representative, and responsive, but our current federal government is none of these. Fixing these issues requires starting with a much smaller government. I’ve shifted from a left-leaning democratic liberal to a centrist libertarian who also believes in the importance and power of traditional institutions (is there a term for that?).

Thing #3: Mainstream 🔉

“Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.” – Buddha

“Ehi Passiko.” (“Come and see for yourself.”) – Buddha

This is closely related to the previous point. I used to rely on mainstream sources for my news and trusted what I read. I didn’t question these sources or consider alternatives. I regularly read the NYT, The Economist, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic—like any good, educated, liberal New Yorker. I avoided TV news and social media for news, though I did occasionally listen to NPR.

While I knew these outlets weren’t perfect or unbiased, I believed they were relatively centrist, with a reasonable left-leaning bias. I appreciated how the NYT covered the suffering of ordinary people due to war, displacement, unemployment, or homelessness.

If this sounds naive today, remember that I grew up when politics was less contentious. There was more or less agreement on the ground truth, and disagreements were about interpretations of the same facts.

Things began to change for me during the Trump era. The first major crack was the 2016 election coverage, which I found extraordinarily distasteful. This isn’t to say the mainstream media was perfect before 2016 or that the cracks hadn’t already appeared. A notable earlier shortcoming was the universal criticism of Bitcoin from the beginning, with no effort to understand or present the other side. But 2016 was when the mainstream media’s flaws became glaringly obvious to me.

Things only worsened from there. The pandemic was the final straw. I was shocked by how the NYT and other mainstream outlets initially dismissed the lab leak theory—something they backpedaled on much later, after years of accumulating evidence. I was appalled by how strongly the liberal mainstream media pushed the vaccines and labeled anyone with doubts as “anti-vax”—a topic I wrote about in the very first issue of Three Things! The deplatforming of dissenting voices and the smugness of so-called experts, who appeared constantly in the mainstream media, further eroded my trust. (And it has recently emerged that they, too, were full of shit. Surprise, surprise.)

Combined with a shift towards low-quality clickbait content, a broken business model, and the departure (or dismissal) of the best voices to platforms like Substack, mainstream media has lost my trust completely. And I’m not alone.

I’m glad I changed my mind about the value of mainstream media and feel bad for those who haven’t. But the situation isn’t ideal. What does it mean for me and the world? It means I have to cast a wider net to understand what’s going on: Telegram groups, Reddit, Hacker News, podcasts, and social media platforms like X. It means listening to dissenting voices and not immediately dismissing ideas just because they’re labeled as conspiracy theories. It means separating flawed people from good ideas. (One example: Alex Jones is unpopular for good reason, but he’s been at least partially right about some things, including “gay frogs” (referring to endocrine disruptors) and the real possibility of recent UFO encounters.)

It means thinking and judging for myself. I personally have no issue doing this because I’m reasonably well-educated on most topics, believe in personal responsibility, and have always been deeply curious. I enjoy doing my own homework and am not afraid to admit when I’m wrong or out of my depth. I no longer reflexively defer to experts just because of their title or authority, but I also don’t dismiss all experts out of hand either.

This approach requires more effort and can be exhausting. Sometimes, it makes me want to withdraw from the world due to the negativity and contention. It’s not pleasant to distrust others or the mainstream narrative. It’s a negative trend. We need to reestablish some shared notion of truth if society is to progress.

I no longer believe existing institutions and media will resolve this mess. We need something different, digitally native, and designed for all the complexity and nuance of the modern world. I’ve written about a few ideas previously; I’d love to hear yours.