Surviving This Era
Seeing through the politics
I speak sometimes about how people have to be careful out there with that they consume and take for truth. I harp on this because I believe that in every system that’s relatively secure, humans are always the weakest link. Often, the reason why your billion dollar organization is being ransomed by hackers for millions of dollars is just that. Even if you made sure to spend lots of resources securing everything, there’s going to be some guy that clicks a stupid email and or someone that answers the phone and gives out information they were not supposed to give. One thing I never wanted to be is the guy that got played.
No Trust
A ‘no trust’ mentality is the best mentality to have on the internet. Unfortunately a lot of people will say they don’t trust anything on the internet “blah blah blah”… But soon enough they get to a subject they are passionate about or really want to know about and that “I don’t trust anything” dwindles down to the truth, “I don’t know what to trust”. This is because they’re doing the ‘No Trust’ thing all wrong.
If you’re operating with ‘no trust’ it means you’re looking at information but are looking for or waiting on verification. Instead of this, what people do is “hear both sides” contradicting each other now they don’t even know who to “trust”. They forget or don’t know the entire point of that mentality was to not trust AT ALL, verify. This also goes for everyone on social media, including me. Outsourcing your thinking to others is fine but you have to continuously vet them and make sure you’re getting good and current information. Sometimes people are dropping gems today and go completely insane tomorrow, it’s up to you to spot that.
There is an exception to this outsourcing rule though, and that’s politics. Often when it comes to politics, the smartest guys in the room turn into bumbling idiots. It’s an interesting phenomenon, you could have a neurosurgeon that’s done countless complex surgeries and applies the finest reasoning skills on a daily basis. But, as soon as it comes to politics all of that goes out of the window and they could tell you something like “I think my dog would make a great president”. Then, proceed to be completely irrational “he loves people, he doesn’t bark much”. It leaves you befuddled mf like WTF? How can this happen? This is why you can’t outsource anything that get’s political, everyone becomes get’s very irrational. These are matters you have to research and information you have to verify on your own. Yes, it can be tedious work but unless you just want to be a pawn in somebody else’s game, its work that has to be done.
Ok, How?
Change the way you look at information - Information itself should mean absolutely nothing to you until it’s verified. If information is not verified, with evidence, you simply don’t know if it’s true (duh). Everyday I scroll through my Twitter/X feed I read things but think nothing of any of it. When you get information that’s not verified, just read it and tell yourself “whatever”. Sure, you can try to counter this mindset by saying “not everything that’s true has evidence”. You would be right, but there’s rarely a circumstance where you can do anything meaningful with information that’s not verified. “The CIA kidnapped Taylor Swift”, cool story and no matter how true or plausible it might be. If you have no evidence, there’s not much you can do about it. If you can’t do anything about it, it should be meaningless to you. You have a family, friends and your own self interests to worry about.
Have patience - A big problem people have is not giving a situation time to develop. Most conspiracy theories would not even exist if people just waited a day or 2 before reading about a situation. *THERE’s THIS INSANE THING HAPPENING RIGHT NOW*, well is it affecting me right now? No? Well, I’ll read all about it in 2 days. ←——- If people could be this patient we would have world peace (lol). People will often accuse the “media” of lying during times like this. I don’t think they understand that when a situation is developing there’s a lot of fog and it’s easy to misunderstand what’s happening. When you’re trying to piece together a story that’s happening in real time, mistakes are bound to happen. Hindsight is always 20/20, unless the trouble is going to affect you personally, leave it alone for a few days and come back to it.
Again, don’t trust anyone, ESPECIALLY political pundits, verify everything or wait for it to get verified - Check the source, cross reference with multiple sources, check dates, check references, check the author’s background, ask experts, be patient.
It takes work yes, but you don’t want to be the idiot making suboptimal decisions and saying things you regret in a few years because you’re operating on bad information. As, always thanks for reading, if you have any questions just ask them below because I don’t even know if I’m explaining this right…