Whatever Gets You Through

Comfort, conspiracy, outrage – and the stories we choose to survive the noise.

How we cope when the truth feels buried under spin, rage, and performance.

There are days now when reality feels like a pub story told by six different people, all of them dead certain, all of them leaving out the bit that makes their version wobble.

You hear one account, then another, then a clip, then a graph, then some bloke on your phone speaking with the confidence of a surgeon and the evidence base of a Labrador. Somewhere a fake image is doing the rounds. Somewhere a voice has been cloned. Somewhere an algorithm has decided that what your nervous system really needs at 10.14 on a Tuesday morning is one more reason to panic, sneer, or feel briefly superior. And somehow, in the middle of all this, you are meant to work out what is actually true.

That is the tiring part. Not just that there is too much information, but that so much of it arrives bent. Every claim has a sponsor, a slant, a business model, a tribe, a mood attached to it. Even the stuff that turns out to be true often reaches you through people who are using it for reasons that have bugger-all to do with truth. After a while, the whole exercise starts to feel less like staying informed and more like being made to do unpaid forensic work on behalf of the internet.

And that kind of effort wears you down. You can feel it. I can feel it. There comes a point where you do not want one more take, one more thread, one more solemn little explainer from someone with a blue tick and a lighting setup. You do not want to keep cross-checking the world like a suspicious accountant. You just want something that feels believable enough to let you get on with your day.

That is where belief changes shape. It stops being a matter of deduction and becomes a matter of emotional selection. You do not always choose the thing that seems most likely to be true. You choose the thing that helps you live.

For some people, that means comfort. If the economy looks cooked, if the climate looks grim, if institutions seem to be falling to bits in public, then the most appealing story in the room is the one that says: relax, mate, it’s all cyclical, humanity has seen worse, the media loves a panic, go outside, touch grass, have a sandwich. There is something deeply understandable about that. Sometimes the lie you want is not an exciting one. Sometimes you just want a story that lowers your blood pressure enough to let you sleep.

For others, comfort is not the draw. Drama is. If the world feels too messy, too random, too humiliatingly hard to understand, then a big glossy conspiracy can be weirdly energising. Suddenly the chaos has a plot. Suddenly the nonsense joins up. Suddenly all the little stupidities of public life are not random at all but evidence of a hidden design. Better still, you get to be one of the rare sharp-eyed geniuses who saw through it. There is a reason conspiracy thinking can feel so alive. It turns confusion into superiority. It gives the mess a villain, the noise a pattern, and you a starring role.

Then there is rage, which may be the most efficient drug of the lot. Anger clears things up fast. Once you are properly furious, ambiguity becomes inconvenient and detail becomes optional. You do not need to know exactly what happened. You mainly need to know who to blame. Outrage gives shape to the day. It gives you purpose. It gives you a side. It can feel like moral seriousness when half the time it is just stimulation with a self-righteous hat on. And because the platforms know this down to the molecular level, they keep serving it up hot, all day, every day.

So you end up with three broad ways people cope. The cosy version: everything is fine, or near enough. The thrilling version: nothing is what it seems, and I have cracked the code. The furious version: everything is rotten, and at least I know whose fault it is. Different flavours, same basic move. Belief stops being a tool for navigating reality and starts being a form of self-medication.

That is the trap. We like to imagine our convictions come from some noble process of reasoning, but very often they are doing a simpler job. They are helping us regulate feeling. Truth becomes something like a consumer good. You pick the version that suits your metabolism.

And look, that sounds damning, but it is also just human. It is hard work trying to stay properly tethered to reality when reality comes at you through a system designed not to clarify but to agitate. The internet does not merely inform you. It leans on you. It pokes your threat response. It rewards instant takes, punishes hesitation, and treats uncertainty as weakness or cowardice or poor personal branding. The pressure to have an opinion on everything, immediately, is one of the more ridiculous features of modern life, yet most of us submit to it far more often than we should.

Which is why one of the better options is also one of the least glamorous: saying, I do not know.

Not in a fake-modest way. Not as a throat-clearing move before giving your opinion anyway. I mean actually saying: I have not seen enough reliable information to know what is true here, so I am not going to perform certainty for the room. That is harder than it sounds. It feels socially awkward. It can feel like weakness. But it is probably the healthiest epistemic habit left to us. There is a lot of dignity in refusing to let the timeline bully you into a position before you have earned one.

Another useful move is to shrink your radius. When the big picture starts to feel impossible to verify, come back to what you can actually touch. You may not be able to confidently sort out some swirling international story while it is still being half-invented online, but you can tell whether your suburb is getting rougher or poorer. You can tell what groceries cost. You can tell if your friends are stretched thin, if your local services are worse, if your neighbours need a hand, if the mood around you has shifted. None of that solves the larger crisis, but it stops you floating away into abstraction. It reminds you that reality is not only what is trending. It is also what is happening three streets over.

Then there is triangulation, which sounds fancy but is really just common sense in work boots. If no single source is pure, stop looking for purity. Read three accounts from people with different biases and look for the dull overlap. Not the spin. Not the adjectives. Not the chest-beating. Just the boring shared bits: who was there, what time it happened, what got signed, what was said on the record, what all sides reluctantly agree on. Keep the nouns. Distrust the mood music. The truth, or something close to it, is often hiding in the least sexy part of the story.

None of this is exciting. That may be the point. A lot of modern bullshit relies on making boring things feel intolerable. If you can tolerate the boring bits – uncertainty, delay, partial knowledge, conflicting accounts, unanswered questions – you are already less manipulable than the average person flapping around online.

That said, once you admit how cracked the whole information environment has become, the absurdist alternatives start to carry a certain appeal. Spite-based epistemology has its charms: simply believe the opposite of whatever your most annoying relative says and see how far that gets you. The squirrel method has genuine elegance: if the squirrel outside your window is not panicking, perhaps this story can wait until after lunch. Magic 8-Ball verification has, at minimum, the virtue of honesty. “Reply hazy, try again” is still more respectable than a lot of commentary. The kitchen rule is strong too: if it did not happen in my kitchen, I am reserving judgment. New exoplanet? Not in the kitchen. Constitutional crisis? Not between the kettle and the toaster, mate.

These are jokes, obviously, but only just. They are funny because they get at a real exhaustion. There is a part of you – of me too – that would happily hand the whole burden of reality-checking over to a household ritual, a woodland creature, or a plastic toy if it meant no longer having to audit every bloody claim that floated past.

And maybe that is what this whole mess exposes most clearly. Not just that people are gullible, or tribal, or a bit mad. We knew that already. What it shows is how badly people want somewhere to put their trust, and how quickly that need gets rerouted into mood, identity, and story when the old public signals break down. When we can no longer tell what is true with any confidence, we start revealing ourselves in the things we choose to believe. Not just what we think, but what kind of relief we are looking for.

Some of us want a warm blanket. Some want a thriller. Some want a target. Some, on our better days, want to stay close to what can still be checked, still be witnessed, still be corroborated by something other than vibes.

That may be the best we can do for now. Not perfect certainty. Not some heroic purity of reason. Just a bit more patience. A bit more humility. A bit more willingness to say, that sounds possible, but I am not swallowing it yet.

A bit more attention to the local, the tangible, the boringly verifiable. And maybe a bit less confidence in the part of ourselves that always wants reality to arrive already shaped into a story that flatters our feelings.

Because in the end, when the signal-to-noise ratio really does start dropping toward zero, what matters is not whether you can solve the whole mess in one grand act of intellect. You cannot. What matters is whether you can resist turning belief into pure emotional convenience. Whether you can live, at least some of the time, without immediately reaching for the version of events that soothes you, excites you, or winds you up just right.

That is not a grand solution. But it is a way of staying a little bit honest. And these days, that is no small thing.

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Colophon

Reading: Arendt, Orwell, Didion, and DeLillo’s White Noise, and thinking about how badly equipped we are for this kind of informational weather: the constant hum of misinformation, propaganda, spin, deepfakes, bait, bias, and algorithmic distortion. Not just falsehood, but saturation. Not just confusion, but fatigue. At some point the effort of sorting reality from performance becomes too much, and belief starts shifting from deduction to emotional selection – not what is most likely true, but what feels most liveable.

Listening to: Leonard Cohen, In My Secret Life – because it understands the split between the world as it is presented and the world as it is inwardly lived. It carries that sense of private moral wrestling inside a reality that no longer feels clean, shared, or entirely trustworthy. The song feels less like commentary than condition: not panic, not certainty, but the weary, lucid effort of remaining human inside distortion.