This is a message for the next generation.
Be prepared, you're going to change. Maybe everyday, every week, every month, every year.
There is a parable known as the ship of Perseus. Perseus is a legendary figure from Greek myth. Within the parable, a museum claims to have the original ship that Perseus used. When they were pressed, they did at one point have the original ship, and then some boards rotted out and they replaced them. And then later on some sales rotted out and they had to replace those. Eventually after centuries, every single piece of the ship had been replaced, the philosophical question is, this ship made up of entirely different components than that one, can you still consider it to be perseus's ship? If not, at what point did it stop being that?
The human body is the most amazing thing you could possibly imagine. One of the things that makes it so amazing is the fact that it isn't one thing. The human body is made up of millions of little things called cells each one of them doing its job and acting in concert with each other one in unbelievably complicated ways that allow this jumble of tiny little individual units to become the thing that you are. One of the most dangerous diseases is something called cancer. Each of those individual cells has a specific lifetime, and a certain number of times that it is allowed to reproduce on its own, because if it didn't then the body would just continue to grow and grow and grow until it was just a massive dense clump of cells of different types. All it takes is for one cell to stop following its preordained destiny to start a disease that will eventually destroy the body. The reason I talk about this is to give you an idea of just how delicate the balance is within this amazing piece of biological machinery. Millions of cells and thousands of different types of cells each do their job more or less perfectly and as a result somehow all of them working together are represented by a single consciousness that is you. Much like the ship of perseus, you are constantly changing as well. Those individual cells live their lives, divide, and die. It is said that every 7 years every cell in your body has been replaced. In spite of this absolute transformation, we still feel like the same person.
Just as our bodies can fundamentally change over the years, our opinions can also change. New data can and should change your mind about things. There are a lot of people out there who seek power who are going to insist absolute consistency your entire life. One of the reasons that they insist this is that often they have figured out ways to mold you and shape you into what they want, and if you change then you necessarily change into something they don't want and can't control.
Don't be mistaken, I'm not saying that we need to go out and change everything about ourselves all the time. Instead, what I'm saying is that sometimes the time for change has come, and as long as the change is fully justified it's okay to be different today than you were yesterday.
Speaking of our bodies, the human brain is the ultimate example of the incredible power of our biological machine. When you were born, there was nothing in your DNA that told your brain how to speak to your eyes, or your nerve endings. There was something that described your brain in a general sense, and it was your experiences that wired your brain. There are people who are born without vision who who learn how to connect their ears to their visual cortex. In so doing, their brains learn how to use echolocation so that even though that person doesn't have access to their eyes they can see the world. In the same way, we aren't born knowing how to move, we slowly learn how to move by moving our hands and fingers and testing things and seeing how everything fits together. Our brains wire themselves around the stimuli. Imagine that, the genetic code that makes you doesn't describe a lot of the fundamental important things about how to operate. It passes that task on to the environment, and the brain wire itself.
The human brain doesn't rewire itself to quite the same extent as you get older but the fundamental idea of the brain wiring itself also applies to ideas.
When I was a young man who had just gotten out into the world one of my personal goals was to meet someone to share my life with. At that moment, I had never really spent any time thinking about women that way. Of course I wanted to meet women, but I hadn't really put any real effort into it so it didn't happen. Until that moment in my life I was more focused on building my life. I had a lifetime of experiences but I thought that I just didn't know anything about women, and because of that I didn't even know where to start. One of the most important things that I had to learn was about the female experience, but the really interesting thing is I already knew almost everything I needed to know. The journey for me was actually about learning just a few little pieces of information that would take my lifetime of experiences and connect them in ways that fundamentally changed how I looked at the topic. At the time, I thought of it like a bunch of little worms burrowing through my brain. Individually they weren't anything to speak of, but they connected little chambers of knowledge that I already had in my brain, and in so doing fundamentally changed the way I look at the world.
My view of the world is also changed as my place within it changed. I had one set of opinions when I was a young man from a relatively poor family, and a completely different one as someone who had found a meaningful place in the world. I know that some of my experiences working with contractors has definitely changed my view of capitalism, because you go from assuming that something isn't working just seeing it work very well, and you realize that maybe you were wrong after all.
On the other hand, sometimes the change is in the other direction. You may think that you have an opinion but it's not a very well formed one, and as you get more information you realize you were right all along. A lot of people think that there's something shameful in affirming your own beliefs. Personally, as long as that affirmation is based on truth and you're not just trying to convince yourself of something that isn't true because it's more convenient to believe something than something else, I think that affirming your beliefs is just as important as criticizing them.
In fact, one of the most dangerous methods bad actors use in order to keep people from accepting truths if they don't like is to get you to keep questioning things again and again and again not because there's anything wrong with them but because they hope that if they get you to question them enough times you'll change your mind to what they want you to change your mind to.
And that brings me to one of the most important things and it's already been a running theme in this essay, people are always going to be trying to change you to be something more useful to them. Not just you, everyone. The power to change minds is the power to change the world. You need to keep a close eye because there are always bad actors out there hoping to change the world in ways that are bad using the language of changes that are good. Some people will use the name of progress to try to convince you to adopt bad policies. Right now at this moment in time there are people out there who are trying to make heinous crimes against children acceptable. That's not a change I can get behind. On the other hand, there are other people who will use the name of going back to the good old days to regress society in ways most people would fundamentally disagree with if they had to live it. Recently, I've seen people trying to change minds by forcing us into a false dichotomy: they say we need to choose either one group of bad people or another group of bad people, and there is no other choice and to refuse to choose is to let what they paint as the worse group of bad people win. Learning how to see past the pretty words to the reality of something being proposed is an important skill and something that only comes with experience. Just try not to make the mistake of falling for pretty words that you might later regret.
Finally, the last thing I want to talk about on this subject is that change isn't always dramatic, and sometimes it is the subtle changes that are the most important in your life. Nuance does matter, and as you consider the attitudes that you take on throughout your life, sometimes you'll find that your attitude hasn't fundamentally changed but minor but crucial elements of it have. Maybe you have to take a utopian ideal and temper it someone with reality. I know that as I've aged, this has been a big part of figuring out what I actually believe. Utopian ideals very rarely survive contact with the outside world. Human beings are not built for Utopia, human beings are built to survive in a world that sometimes has some very bad things going on. It's okay to keep your eyes in the clouds and hope for a better tomorrow. As human beings I think that that's one of our most important characteristics and one of the reasons why we've become the dominant species on the planet despite being physically weak, lacking any natural weapons, being worse predators than the predators and worse herbivores than the herbivores, and overall just being very fragile creatures. We use those giant brains of ours to imagine a better tomorrow, and course correct along the way as more data comes in in order to make something as close as possible to that tomorrow happen. That requires nuance, it requires a willingness to change without a demand to change everything. When someone comes to you with a big argument it's okay to only be persuaded by bits and pieces, and to take those bits and pieces and use them while casting away the unpersuasive parts of an argument.
In the end, however you decide to change, as long as you remain someone you can be proud of being and someone you can look in the mirror and live with, that's the most important thing. It's okay to be wrong, you can change the things that are wrong. It's okay to be right, and it's okay to be right in the moment but you have to change later. Our bodies are made up of millions of cells each one of them will be replaced multiple multiple multiple times within your lifetime. The only thing that's not going to change is you will wake up tomorrow as yourself, and you're going to have to live with that person whoever they become.
Be prepared, you're going to change. Maybe everyday, every week, every month, every year.
There is a parable known as the ship of Perseus. Perseus is a legendary figure from Greek myth. Within the parable, a museum claims to have the original ship that Perseus used. When they were pressed, they did at one point have the original ship, and then some boards rotted out and they replaced them. And then later on some sales rotted out and they had to replace those. Eventually after centuries, every single piece of the ship had been replaced, the philosophical question is, this ship made up of entirely different components than that one, can you still consider it to be perseus's ship? If not, at what point did it stop being that?
The human body is the most amazing thing you could possibly imagine. One of the things that makes it so amazing is the fact that it isn't one thing. The human body is made up of millions of little things called cells each one of them doing its job and acting in concert with each other one in unbelievably complicated ways that allow this jumble of tiny little individual units to become the thing that you are. One of the most dangerous diseases is something called cancer. Each of those individual cells has a specific lifetime, and a certain number of times that it is allowed to reproduce on its own, because if it didn't then the body would just continue to grow and grow and grow until it was just a massive dense clump of cells of different types. All it takes is for one cell to stop following its preordained destiny to start a disease that will eventually destroy the body. The reason I talk about this is to give you an idea of just how delicate the balance is within this amazing piece of biological machinery. Millions of cells and thousands of different types of cells each do their job more or less perfectly and as a result somehow all of them working together are represented by a single consciousness that is you. Much like the ship of perseus, you are constantly changing as well. Those individual cells live their lives, divide, and die. It is said that every 7 years every cell in your body has been replaced. In spite of this absolute transformation, we still feel like the same person.
Just as our bodies can fundamentally change over the years, our opinions can also change. New data can and should change your mind about things. There are a lot of people out there who seek power who are going to insist absolute consistency your entire life. One of the reasons that they insist this is that often they have figured out ways to mold you and shape you into what they want, and if you change then you necessarily change into something they don't want and can't control.
Don't be mistaken, I'm not saying that we need to go out and change everything about ourselves all the time. Instead, what I'm saying is that sometimes the time for change has come, and as long as the change is fully justified it's okay to be different today than you were yesterday.
Speaking of our bodies, the human brain is the ultimate example of the incredible power of our biological machine. When you were born, there was nothing in your DNA that told your brain how to speak to your eyes, or your nerve endings. There was something that described your brain in a general sense, and it was your experiences that wired your brain. There are people who are born without vision who who learn how to connect their ears to their visual cortex. In so doing, their brains learn how to use echolocation so that even though that person doesn't have access to their eyes they can see the world. In the same way, we aren't born knowing how to move, we slowly learn how to move by moving our hands and fingers and testing things and seeing how everything fits together. Our brains wire themselves around the stimuli. Imagine that, the genetic code that makes you doesn't describe a lot of the fundamental important things about how to operate. It passes that task on to the environment, and the brain wire itself.
The human brain doesn't rewire itself to quite the same extent as you get older but the fundamental idea of the brain wiring itself also applies to ideas.
When I was a young man who had just gotten out into the world one of my personal goals was to meet someone to share my life with. At that moment, I had never really spent any time thinking about women that way. Of course I wanted to meet women, but I hadn't really put any real effort into it so it didn't happen. Until that moment in my life I was more focused on building my life. I had a lifetime of experiences but I thought that I just didn't know anything about women, and because of that I didn't even know where to start. One of the most important things that I had to learn was about the female experience, but the really interesting thing is I already knew almost everything I needed to know. The journey for me was actually about learning just a few little pieces of information that would take my lifetime of experiences and connect them in ways that fundamentally changed how I looked at the topic. At the time, I thought of it like a bunch of little worms burrowing through my brain. Individually they weren't anything to speak of, but they connected little chambers of knowledge that I already had in my brain, and in so doing fundamentally changed the way I look at the world.
My view of the world is also changed as my place within it changed. I had one set of opinions when I was a young man from a relatively poor family, and a completely different one as someone who had found a meaningful place in the world. I know that some of my experiences working with contractors has definitely changed my view of capitalism, because you go from assuming that something isn't working just seeing it work very well, and you realize that maybe you were wrong after all.
On the other hand, sometimes the change is in the other direction. You may think that you have an opinion but it's not a very well formed one, and as you get more information you realize you were right all along. A lot of people think that there's something shameful in affirming your own beliefs. Personally, as long as that affirmation is based on truth and you're not just trying to convince yourself of something that isn't true because it's more convenient to believe something than something else, I think that affirming your beliefs is just as important as criticizing them.
In fact, one of the most dangerous methods bad actors use in order to keep people from accepting truths if they don't like is to get you to keep questioning things again and again and again not because there's anything wrong with them but because they hope that if they get you to question them enough times you'll change your mind to what they want you to change your mind to.
And that brings me to one of the most important things and it's already been a running theme in this essay, people are always going to be trying to change you to be something more useful to them. Not just you, everyone. The power to change minds is the power to change the world. You need to keep a close eye because there are always bad actors out there hoping to change the world in ways that are bad using the language of changes that are good. Some people will use the name of progress to try to convince you to adopt bad policies. Right now at this moment in time there are people out there who are trying to make heinous crimes against children acceptable. That's not a change I can get behind. On the other hand, there are other people who will use the name of going back to the good old days to regress society in ways most people would fundamentally disagree with if they had to live it. Recently, I've seen people trying to change minds by forcing us into a false dichotomy: they say we need to choose either one group of bad people or another group of bad people, and there is no other choice and to refuse to choose is to let what they paint as the worse group of bad people win. Learning how to see past the pretty words to the reality of something being proposed is an important skill and something that only comes with experience. Just try not to make the mistake of falling for pretty words that you might later regret.
Finally, the last thing I want to talk about on this subject is that change isn't always dramatic, and sometimes it is the subtle changes that are the most important in your life. Nuance does matter, and as you consider the attitudes that you take on throughout your life, sometimes you'll find that your attitude hasn't fundamentally changed but minor but crucial elements of it have. Maybe you have to take a utopian ideal and temper it someone with reality. I know that as I've aged, this has been a big part of figuring out what I actually believe. Utopian ideals very rarely survive contact with the outside world. Human beings are not built for Utopia, human beings are built to survive in a world that sometimes has some very bad things going on. It's okay to keep your eyes in the clouds and hope for a better tomorrow. As human beings I think that that's one of our most important characteristics and one of the reasons why we've become the dominant species on the planet despite being physically weak, lacking any natural weapons, being worse predators than the predators and worse herbivores than the herbivores, and overall just being very fragile creatures. We use those giant brains of ours to imagine a better tomorrow, and course correct along the way as more data comes in in order to make something as close as possible to that tomorrow happen. That requires nuance, it requires a willingness to change without a demand to change everything. When someone comes to you with a big argument it's okay to only be persuaded by bits and pieces, and to take those bits and pieces and use them while casting away the unpersuasive parts of an argument.
In the end, however you decide to change, as long as you remain someone you can be proud of being and someone you can look in the mirror and live with, that's the most important thing. It's okay to be wrong, you can change the things that are wrong. It's okay to be right, and it's okay to be right in the moment but you have to change later. Our bodies are made up of millions of cells each one of them will be replaced multiple multiple multiple times within your lifetime. The only thing that's not going to change is you will wake up tomorrow as yourself, and you're going to have to live with that person whoever they become.
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