Sometime between the release of Photoshop in 1990 and the release of Forrest Gump in 1994, I realized that I would never trust any photographic image again. This has unexpectedly saved me an enormous amount of time, due to its side effect of my not being interested in looking at any image from cute kittens to YouTube videos, because why waste my time? I won’t know if it’s real or not, so I don’t really care.

My default reaction to anything remotely peculiar or startling is, That’s fake.

For most of my adult life I have been a person who thinks that if you don’t see the actual thing you haven’t seen it. A photograph of the Mona Lisa is not like seeing the Mona Lisa; a video of a fireworks celebration is not like experiencing a fireworks celebration. This has unexpectedly enriched my life, due to its side effect of spurring me to leave my domicile and seek real experiences.

I don’t think re-creations are useless. I learn from and enjoy listening to recorded music, although I am well aware of the limitations of playback, having heard a lot of live performances. I can get an idea of something I’ve never experienced, such as a drone display, by watching one on YouTube, though I would still assert I have never seen one.

As part of the post-election analysis, most of which I’m avoiding, I read that people no longer believe what they see, rather they see what they believe. This has always been true. It took me a long time to accept it, but even engineers bring a lot of bias and emotion to the decisions we make. Even me. It’s part of being human, and arguably critical to the survival of social animals.

Now, however, this is making us crazy, and I’m not assigning craziness to a particular viewpoint. All of us have become amazingly credulous about all sorts of goofiness we can’t easily confirm, and even about many things we can easily confirm yet for some reason continue to deny. Whether you believe the earth is flat or that people who disagree with you are uneducated, you can think, investigate, observe, engage, or poke around to learn more.

The hard part is, you can’t do this wholly, or even primarily, using the Internet, a compendium of every truth and every falsehood that has occurred to man from the beginning of time, a scrapheap of uncurated gobbledygook. At most you could start with an assertion from the Internet, but you have to corroborate or refute it elsewhere.

When I say hard, I mean really hard. No matter which authority you favor, that site or person has biases, and is going to present something that is wrong. We still subscribe to the New York Times, yet I never read the opinion columns and I’m wary about anything it posts regarding nutrition or health. I guess the good news is, once you get to know a site you can perceive to see its weaknesses, but only if you’ve exposed yourself to other sources of information and kept an open mind.

It’s also hard because so many organizations and salespeople with a megaphone are telling us what they want us to believe in order to get us to do something, with no compunction about confining themselves to the truth and no motivation to give us advice that will make us calmer or more resilient.

In other words, Photoshop was perhaps the beginning, and now most of us are living in a headspace that is completely artificial. We need to get back to basics, which for me are a deep connection with Earth and with each other.