In high school, I was pro-death penalty. As part of a class on politics, I was randomly assigned the anti-death penalty position to research and debate on. I very quickly changed my opinion when I learned about the systemic racism involved. Now I'm an anarchist

I used to joke about eating two animals for every one a vegetarian didn't eat. I've been vegan for over a decade now, pulled a bit of an uno reverse in my early twenties.

That people are smart.

Most people are abject morons who still believe in Iron Age mythology.

Before using AI for the first time: "Holy shit this is gonna be dope!"

Aftwr using AI: "Yo wtf? This is bullshit."

I used to be anti-nuclear energy until I learned a bunch of science and engineering behind it. Turns out things are less scary when you know more about them.

Edit: I also learned that it's okay, and usually preferable, to not have a strong opinion about things that you don't know about.

Homophobia was the norm where I grew up in the '80s and '90s. Took me until the late '90s to start questioning that, and probably a year or two more to become completely cleansed of it.

Google, Reddit, etc. are good. Now I know the horrors and they are obviously our worst enemies.

That we don't need school and it's useless. I used to not like going to school when I was younger. Now I love it and look forward to almost every day, especially now that this is my last year in high school.

That Trumpers can be reasoned with and redeemed.

I held this belief until Jan 6th, but I've only felt more validated that Trump supporters are fundamentally irredeemable monsters who should be treated like hostile terrorists rather than fellow citizens.

Eating meat. I used to vaguely mock vegans when I was in college (UK, so 16-18 years old). I used to say shit like "don't you just miss bacon though" and "the animals already dead, you might as well eat it now or it goes to waste". I've since done a 180 and I'm close to 10 years of veganism. Best decision I ever made for both my health and mental wellbeing.

Israel was justified in their (initial) retaliation for October 7.

Gone so far in the other direction that I now firmly believe Israel should be wiped off the fucking map. Decades of propaganda convinced me they weren't violent colonizers.

Fuck Israel. From the river to the sea.

That the world was ran by a cabal of evil people, genuinely thought it was mostly conspiracy theory and it wasn't so organized and fucked up. How naive.

math is hard, annoying, useless

then found shaders, procedural art, freya holmer.

so math is hard, annoying, beautiful. well not exactly 180 then.

That Dems were a leftist party and cared about helping people.

Then I finished high school and started actually paying attention.

Israel.

I thought it was complicated but they had a right to the land because of the holocaust, that countries around them should learn to get along with Israel

Now I know founding Israel was a mistake. Explicitly saying it's a Jewish state will inevitably lead to other groups being suppressed, i.e. Apartheid if not outright genocide. And they are not hated in the region because Muslims and Jews cannot get along, but because Israel was built entirely on stolen land, and they are still in the process of stealing more and genocide those who stand in their way

I used to believe the centrist idea that America needs a strong Republican Party and a strong Democratic Party.

The GOP actively calls all democrats and liberals enemies, demons, terrorists, etcetera while giving the billionaires all on our public wealth, tax breaks and subsidies.

America does not need the GOP at all.

Idk why we've reached the point where anyone saying they're anything but an atheist has to specify that they aren't a bigot. Being religious doesn't make you a bigot and being atheist doesn't mean you aren't one either.

I had a similar 180 though, I used to be an atheist but in the last year or so I pivoted into druidism. Turns out following a religion that focuses on spending time in nature helps to get you out of the house when you're going though a depressive episode.

The US

I used to be excited and optimistic about new technologies. Now I'm just jaded.

That I was a straight Christian.

Freeing myself from those chackles are probably the biggest pivots in my life.

I was raised in a somewhat homophobic household. One of my friend groups throughout high school was pretty densely LGBT, and so I grew. Exposure was all it really took.

I used to hate when Avatar: The Last Airbender aired. The episodes felt like they lasted forever, and I had no interest in anything that was going on. I finally finished watching it about a year ago, and it is one of my favorite shows to date.

I used to be a conservative who shot guns weekly and reloaded ammo. I was deep into the group for years.

The last 6 years I've been democratic, gone to protests and do my best to educate others about the dangers of being on the right.

Problem is, on social media, everyone assumes your lying or a bot, so I can't help convert anyone over to the brighter side.

That a dictatorship led by a "good, strong leader" would be enough to fix any country. Held that belief from ages 16-22. With time, I understood that it would devolve into a bad strong leader anyway, especially because any one single person cannot realistically do everything at such a large scale, nor can they ensure that everyone down the chain of command is "good". Paranoia would seep in, more and more resources would be spent hunting "the bad ones", innocents would be wrongfully accused either by honest mistake or by malicious enemies.

Nowadays, I really enjoy the idea of "Do not take for yourself any power that you would loathe your worst enemy to have" and I wish it could be applied to all levels of politics.

Used to be an apple fanboy, use reddit, use Instagram; now I use linux, grapheneos, Lemmy, and, self host

I grew up with this type of Toilet.

Seated toilets were harder to shit in and I didn't like them at first, but bidet is a formidable upgrade to hand so I like seated toilets more now.

Oh also I used to be a Matt Walsh fan in highschool and now I hate sexists and overall fascism supporters including my old self with disgust.

I wasn't a supporter of euthanasia until I worked in a residential aged care facility.

So many of them. So, so many.

Maybe the only one I’ve kept perfectly intact is my belief that the golden rule is prime.

I was raised a young earth creationist, picketed abortion clinics when I was elementary school aged but don’t worry I was home schooled from kindergarten through high school. Was basically a republican/libertarian until about 2015 when my spiritual leaders, including and especially my parents, began to compromise all of their values.

More recently, probably even until 2020, I viewed myself as an aspiring centrist.

Now I’m an agnostic atheist who is seeing how far left the political spectrum goes, and I still think centrism is a nice idea, in a totally different world than the one we live in, with a totally different meaning to “center”.

Here is the thing I should disclose though, because I suspect it applies to a lot of things.

I was raised steeped in a level of bigotry that was all-encompassing but cloaked in Christian love.

I have intellectually separated myself from that bigotry, but I believe I still have instinctive/subconscious/unidentified bigotries to work through.

I am trying to be very conscious of that as I make my way in the world, trying to love my neighbor as myself, and trying to continuously expand the definition of “neighbor”.

Edit: I also cut my parents out of my life entirely around the time DOGE sent their “fork in the road” email.

Until i was 24 I fell into a camp of thought called transmedicalism. Which is shitty because I am cis and didn't support a friend because of it. By the time I learned what a jackass I was being he died. Don't think my absence in his life was the nail in the coffin at all but there were way too many of us who ignored him when he was almost alone.

I don't think just doing a 180 on my opinion there was enough

A less shitty turnaround was my atheist heelturn. I only think it's worth mentioning because I wasn't awakening from Christian I was awakening from loose agnostic spiritualism. Thought I should be tolerant of people's idiosyncrasies because finding personal meaning is a deep need that we rarely ever get (Fucking ironic considering the transmedicalism, right). 2016 and the following events were my little clue-in to the possibility that people aren't using belief as a way of building meaning, they're using it to justify their worse impulses full stop. I never really respected enlightened reddit athiest brainlets but if there's one thing to take away it's that you don't hate belief in the supernatural enough.

Abortion - till i was about 14 i had thought it should be illegal, but then i grew up a little bit more and realized the topic wasn't like it was being presented at all. The truth is that in many cases an abortion is the best outcome for all parties involved, including the fetus, the person who's pregnant, and all of the rest of us in the world.

And when you start thinking about how to build a system in charge of differentiating which pregnancies should be aborted vs which should be carried to term it immediately becomes clear that if anyone besides the pregnant woman gets to decide then it becomes a literal waking nightmare of horror movie scenarios.

In any non-juvenile view it's obvious that abortion has to be legal, easily available, and entirely up to the pregnant woman to decide on