Don’t Let Knowing Break You.

How to keep your peace while facing the hard truths of the world.

It hit me one night around midnight. I was doomscrolling through yet another thread about media psyops, vaccine data irregularities, and geopolitical theatre when I realised my jaw was tight, my stomach clenched, and my mind was racing. I wasn’t learning, I was bracing. My search for truth had turned into a compulsion. Every headline felt urgent. I thought I was waking up, but really, I was just losing sleep. It hit me that if I kept going like this, the only thing I’d be waking up to was my own exhaustion.

Most of us just started this journey asking reasonable questions. Why are dissenting voices being censored? Why are healthy children being masked and denied their education and childhoods? Why are we pretending lockdown is normal and acceptable?

Those early questions cracked something open. And once it’s open, it doesn’t close again. You start seeing patterns and noticing contradictions. You spot rehearsed language, selective reporting, double standards and massive institutional hypocrisy.

You think: If they lied about this… what else?

But somewhere along the way, the thirst for truth can become a compulsion. There’s always another layer, another leak, another lie. And if you’re not careful, what begins as a search for truth becomes an addiction to an endless cycle of bleak epiphanies.

For most of human history, we lived in small circles. What happened in your village or tribe, births, deaths, droughts, gossip, that was the extent of your mental and emotional burden.

But nowadays we carry in our pockets digital windows into every disaster on the planet. Every war, every crime, every scandal, floods our nervous systems in real time. We know about atrocities we can’t prevent, corruption we can’t touch, psyops we can’t quite untangle. We are drowning in unfiltered knowing.

We’re under constant pressure to ask ourselves: Is this story true, or is it just well-crafted theatre? And is this commentator or podcaster actually helping me see more clearly, or are they just keeping me in a holding pen, a kind of limited hangout dressed up as insight?

(And speaking of bleak epiphanies, the day I learned what a “limited hangout” really meant, and that such a thing even existed, was a sobering one for me.

Most days, I swing between despair and bloody-minded optimism, between feeling crushed by the weight of knowledge, and doggedly determined not to let despair win.

I turned to alternative media in search of sanity, sense and truth. But now I find that it’s not just about asking, “Is this true?” anymore. It’s also about asking, “Is this helping me live in truth without losing my peace?” Am I consuming this information because it grounds me or because I’m hooked on fear? Am I reading this because I seek understanding or because I can’t look away?

We cannot save the world by knowing everything. We will not liberate ourselves through burnout. Discernment must apply not only to the content, but to the consumption itself.

That means boundaries. That means silence. That means deliberately and consciously choosing to protect your nervous system as fiercely as your beliefs.

I don’t want to opt out of caring. I don’t want to go back to sleep. But I do want to step back from the edge, from the anxiety, the overload, the obsession masquerading as awareness.

Sometimes, the most radical act is to log off and go outside for a walk, to read poetry, or bake a cake, clean out a cupboard or enjoy a coffee with a friend. To remember that sanity is not apathy. It’s staying grounded.

I’m still new to this wider-awake world, and I’m realising I can’t take it all in. There’s an infinite number of ways we’ve been lied to or misled, and the more I look, the more I see, and it’s been going on long before I ever arrived on this earth. But I have a finite amount of time, and a finite amount of mental and emotional bandwidth available to me. While I’m grateful to see the world more clearly now, I still want to live and love the life I’ve been given. That means learning what to focus on, and knowing what to set aside for the sake of my sanity and my soul.

Never before in human history have we been able to access so much information so quickly, and we don’t yet know what that does to our psyche. So be careful out there. Discern wisely. Focus on what truly matters, on what you might actually be able to influence for good. Don’t try to know everything, or solve everything. Protect your mind, your soul, your proportionality, your peace. Because in the end, the world needs people who are grounded and at peace with themselves. Guard that peace. Humanity needs it

.