These days, I feel beset on all sides by constant mainstream media, endless streams of news stories, unverifiable videos, and press conferences with leaders from across the world that peddle their own ‘truth’.
I don’t know whether it’s because of clickbait, misinformation, poor journalism, or deepfake videos and photographs, but I do know that I don’t trust much of anything I read or watch online anymore. I don’t have the time, or inclination, to fact-check everything. It just seems easier to not believe any of it.
It is not that I want to be cynical, but I’ve found myself doubting even things that used to feel certain.
Of course, scepticism is nothing new. The word itself has its root in Ancient Greek, meaning “to look closely.” One of the most famous examples is Doubting Thomas in the Bible, who refused to believe until he could see for himself. Perhaps doubt is part of what makes us human. Still, there is something different about the kind of doubt we feel today.
To some degree, my world-view has now shrunk due to the endless volume of information around me and now I only trust in what I can touch with my own hands. But is this healthy?
There is no news.
One Good Friday in 1930, the BBC famously announced, “There is no news,” and filled the rest of the evening bulletin with piano music. Imagine that happening now. These days, the news never stops. Even the quieter moments are filled with analysis, reaction, and opinion. Somewhere between that silent broadcast and the modern twenty-four-hour cycle, we’ve changed our idea of what news is.
When television news began adding music in the 1970s and 1980s, it made the headlines feel more dramatic. This marked a shift in tone, from plain reporting to something more emotional. People started to say that the news had become entertainment. Was that healthy?
A loss of faith.
Now, as social media has become a part of daily life, that shift has only deepened. Unknowable algorithms decide what stories we see. They learn what we engage with, positively or negatively, and feed us more of it. We now live in silos and echo chambers that make the familiar feel true, even when it is not. Psychologists call it the “illusory truth effect”—where repetition of a falsehood can make it seem real. It helps explain why misinformation spreads so easily and why so many people, including me, find it difficult to know what to believe.
According to the Pew Research Center, more than half of adults across Europe say false news is a major problem. In the United States, trust in national news organisations has dropped by 20 percentage points since 2016. That decline in trust feels familiar to me. It reflects a loss of faith, not just in the media, but sometimes in one another. This, in turn, further contributes to the breakdown of our society.
Social media plays its part too. Research in the Cureus Journal of Medical Science explains how platforms use dopamine, the brain’s pleasure chemical, to keep us coming back—being told our posts are getting likes and comments acts as a small but constant reward that we want to seek more of. But the more we scroll, the more we see what we already believe. It is easy to get caught in a cycle of outrage, distraction, and confusion. Is that healthy?
Indulge the doubt.
Yet people have always warned against blind belief. In 1831, William Johnson Neale wrote, “Believe nothing you hear, and but half you see.” Mengzi, the ancient Chinese philosopher, said that “One who believes all of a book would be better off without books.” Even the Buddha is said to have advised against believing anything without testing it for ourselves. My dad, no less a philsopher in his own way, was instead fond of the phrase, “Chew the meat and spit out the bones.”
That might be the key: to test, to question, to think for ourselves. I came across a phrase recently that has stayed with me— “Indulge the doubt.” It means letting people explore their own uncertainty rather than rushing to tell them what to think.
It’s also a key coaching strategy. In both managing staff and working with young people, I see how valuable that can be. When they are allowed to find answers themselves, the learning lasts.
Perhaps that is what we all need now—a little more patience with our doubts, and a little more courage to think independently. Truth might not always be easy to find, but it is still worth looking for.