The Pleasure of Changing Your Mind

Yes You Can

As people get older their habits and opinions often calcify. They stop surprising others and they stop surprising themselves. Their constancy becomes rigidity. Yet there’s no reason to remain locked in. We can change our minds about almost everything:  raw fish, tattoos, musical comedies, succulents: “I didn’t used to like them, but now I do.”

Just two days ago I changed my mind about the inevitable evils of Wall Street. I’d thought that when a private equity firm acquires a company, the results are always disastrous for the workers, because the new owners usually seek to increase the company’s value by cutting costs, optimizing operations, and restructuring the business. But a segment on “60 Minutes” two days ago made me reconsider things.

Pete Stavros, a private equity executive, has emerged as an employee ownership advocate. He believes that the rank and file should own a stake in the companies that employ them. He thinks ownership incentivizes workers to do their best work and make the companies more valuable, so he restructures the companies he buys so the workers own a considerable share of it. When it is sold in a few years, they get a payoff.

In one case, the minimum payoff for recently hired workers was $20,000. One employee who’d worked at the firm for nineteen years received hundreds of thousands of dollars, enabling him and his wife to quit their second jobs and establish a college fund for their three kids. This really made me reconsider “the inevitable evils of Wall Street.”

And I gave myself a little pat on the back for allowing the wind of doubt to sweep through my mind!  (Another pat for allowing this odd mixed metaphor remain!)

Consider the eel. What a weird and unappealing creature! When I saw it on the menu at a Japanese restaurant, I thought its texture must be slimy and its taste unpleasant, but a friend ordered some and offered me a bite. It was a revelation! Now I’ll be incapable of eating at a Japanese place without ordering some dense and deeply delicious unagi.

And I’ve changed my mind about this Substack, which I started in December, 2022. As a committed hedonist, I’ve taken some pride in the weekly production of The Pleasure Principle (except for a recent hiatus while I attended to other projects). To force myself to write regularly, I announced in the subscriber box that a new post would always appear at 11:11 am, ET, every Tuesday.  And this has been the case 68 times. Often, I’d sit down to write on Monday night without even a subject in mind, but because pleasure is so broad, soon I’d find one topic or another to examine.  Then I’d do a deep dive in my mind and see what I could bring to the surface, trying to bring up at least one original thing (at least original to me) about my subject. That was my minimum requirement.

I love a massage, but I can’t think of anything new to say about it, so it was never a topic. Similarly, these days I exult in the lilacs and dogwoods and tulips on my block. But a post about spring flowers? No way. What could I possibly say that would be new?

So every week, I’d settle on a topic and hope it would inspire me to say something new about it. This seat-of-the-pants approach was scary but thrilling, and the results were often a happy surprise. I took pride in never skipping a week, no matter where I was. Two weeks in a row, while in Switzerland, because my laptop didn’t work there, I did my writing on an iPhone. I’m not good with my thumbs, so this was a real challenge, yet I managed. I felt a commitment to myself and my subscribers.  I had to get with the program I’d created for myself!

But on one recent Monday night, I sat down and . . . nothing. Not a topic came to mind. I riffled through an old subject list but everything seemed stale. I finally wrote a short post, but it was bland and colorless, lacking in examples and wit. It could have been written by ChatGPT on a first iteration.

And so, my friends and readers, I have changed my mind about this Substack. No more grinding out words Sunday or Monday without inspiration. My posts will continue to appear on Tuesdays, at 11:11 ET, but I will skip some weeks, perhaps many weeks, because I will only write when I have something new and interesting to say about some form of pleasure. I will write only when I’m truly inspired.

Oh, the pleasure and relief of changing my mind!