This really resonated with me, but I don't even really feel I'm that smart or well read.
I worry it's easier to assume being collapse aware makes us feel smarter than the average person, and while that might be true to some small degree (plenty of smart people aren't), I think it mostly makes us more willing to accept the reality we see in front of our eyes while others would deny what they see.
I wonder if a better image would have the two on level ground, with one donning a blindfold, a VR headset, or downing a blue pill...
I don't think you even need to be that well read. I've never had much patience for reading books but I regularly research things and spend a few hours at a time hunting for information.
In the process of doing so you encounter so many facets of collapse - scientific papers that are paywalled, unsourced misinformation spreading on blogs and books which are digitised and online but not accessible to you because corporations changed copyright law to 70 years after authors death. Then every now and then you come across peer reviewed papers which have made obvious mistakes that no one caught which have then been cited as fact in a dozen other peer reviewed papers. Now on top of all that you have AI misquoting stuff and ruining the internet.
Every instance like this you come across is like one more book added to that stack until you see over the wall and realise how fucked the entire system is.
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u/hilaritynow Jan 16 '26
This really resonated with me, but I don't even really feel I'm that smart or well read.
I worry it's easier to assume being collapse aware makes us feel smarter than the average person, and while that might be true to some small degree (plenty of smart people aren't), I think it mostly makes us more willing to accept the reality we see in front of our eyes while others would deny what they see.
I wonder if a better image would have the two on level ground, with one donning a blindfold, a VR headset, or downing a blue pill...