So you’ve changed your mind

Congratulations! Not an easy thing to do. But if you are simply jumping from one “certain” view to another, I fear you haven’t learned the most important point: your certainty was clearly misguided before, not solely because the idea was wrong but because you are flawed and susceptible to a type of black/white thinking that places you and your ilk (you never truly have a unique thought) as wise carriers of truth in a world where such a thing doesn’t actually exist.

And yet you think you’ve done it again! Somehow admitting being so terribly wrong did so very little to deflate the confidence in your own thinking. Which, ok, I buy that your thinking can get better over time, that you are more likely to, say, fall for a sending-money-from-Africa-please-oh-please-help-me-out scam as a teen, but you didn’t fall for a scam or a dumb idea merely because you were young or naive or poorly read; no, you fell for it because there is something within you that craves knowing the “secret” truth, to having it all figured out, to being in on something big or cool or smart or whatever. Until you realize this and are actually humbled in way where you absorb some real complicity, you’ll bounce around always sure you are better than people who, deep down, aren’t thinking all that differently from you, despite wildly different conclusions.