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At some point in your life, you probably stopped eating a cereal you once enjoyed.
Not because someone yelled at you. Not because it suddenly became illegal. You just learned something new. Maybe you read the nutrition label. Maybe your body stopped feeling great afterward. Maybe you watched what it did to someone else and thought, huh, that doesn’t sit right with me anymore.
So you changed your mind about … cereal. Quietly. Without a news release.
This is a normal part of being an adult. Changing your mind doesn’t have to be some kind of moral failure, as if once you’ve poured a bowl you are required to finish the box for the rest of your life. Even when the cereal turns out to be doing real damage.
Nobody expects you to keep driving a car after you learn the brakes fail. Nobody insists you keep using a product after it injures someone you know. We accept learning, updating, adjusting. It’s called common sense.
And yet when it comes to the bigger things, the things that show up in headlines and conversations and group texts, we freeze. We cling. We double down. Not because we are certain, but because admitting uncertainty or wrongness feels riskier than sticking with what we already defended. Because it feels less like a choice and more like an identity.
