The Exhaustion of Not Knowing What's True
In January, I deleted Instagram and Twitter off my phone. I'd been going back and forth on it for a while. The kind of decision you talk yourself out of a dozen times before you finally just do it. When I'm honest about the reason, it was pretty simple.
I was exhausted in a way I couldn't quite name.
The specific kind of tired
It wasn't the general sense of "the internet has too much in it." Everyone knows that by now. This was something more specific, more draining. It was the feeling of reading something, genuinely not knowing whether it was true, finding one source that confirmed it and another that denied it, and putting my phone down more confused and unsettled than when I picked it up.
What made it worse was the pattern underneath it. The same events, reported in completely opposite directions. The same data points used to support completely opposite conclusions. People stating things with total confidence, and no reliable way to know what was actually true.
After enough of that, your brain doesn't get sharper. It just starts to shut down.
If you've felt something like this, you're not alone in it. The American Psychological Association found that 73% of Americans felt overwhelmed by the number of crises facing the world in 2023. Not a small group of anxious people. Most of us.
Why it's designed this way
The part I keep coming back to is that none of this is an accident.
In 2018, MIT researchers published the largest study ever done on how information spreads online. What they found was striking: false news reaches 1,500 people about six times faster than the truth. And it spreads that fast not because of bots, but because of us. We share things that are novel, surprising, a little unsettling. False information tends to check all of those boxes more reliably than accurate information does.
The platforms are built around what gets shared. Engagement is the product. So the incentives have never really pointed toward giving us a clear picture of the world. Just an engaging one. Once you see that clearly, the exhaustion starts to make more sense. It isn't a personal failing. It's a predictable response to an environment that was never designed with your clarity in mind.
And then AI showed up
What I keep sitting with most is the trajectory. And it's genuinely unsettling.
AI-generated content already exceeded human-generated content in total volume in 2024. The World Economic Forum named AI-powered misinformation the single biggest short-term risk facing the world, ahead of climate, ahead of conflict. These aren't hypothetical concerns anymore.
False information was already traveling six times faster than the truth. Before AI could generate a convincing article in seconds. Before a deepfake video was essentially free to produce. It's hard to see where the ceiling is now. I don't think anyone has a clear answer to that yet. And I think most people who are being honest would admit the same.
What I did about it
So I deleted the apps. Two months later, I genuinely feel better. Calmer. Less like I'm constantly trying to solve a puzzle where someone keeps quietly changing the pieces.
I want to be honest about that, because I think it matters.
But something else crept in alongside the relief. A kind of guilt I hadn't anticipated. The Reuters Institute's 2025 Digital News Report found that 40% of people now actively avoid the news, the highest figure they've ever recorded. I'm apparently one of them, which means this isn't some fringe response to an overwhelming system. It's a mass exit.
And I started thinking about what it means that I'm able to make this choice. Opting out is something you can only really do if the personal cost of not knowing is low enough. If your safety, your livelihood, or your rights aren't in a place where staying informed feels like a genuine necessity, then checking out is an available option. I have that. A lot of people don't.
The people most affected by what's happening in the world are often the ones already working the hardest to find something reliable inside all the noise. When people like me step back, the space doesn't get quieter. It just gets louder.
I don't have a clean answer for that. But I think it's worth sitting with.
Where that leaves me
That relief is real. I'm not going to minimize it.
I'm also aware that what I solved was my own discomfort. Not the thing causing it. The information environment didn't slow down when I stepped back. If anything, it's moving faster than ever, in ways that nobody has quite figured out how to address.
I don't know what the right answer looks like from here. I suspect nobody does, not fully. But I think there's something in just being able to name it: the exhaustion, the confusion, the low-level dread of watching something get harder without a clear sense of whether it ever gets easier.
If you've been feeling some version of that, I don't think something is wrong with you.
It means you've been paying attention.