I’ve spent my life shaping narratives for myself and others. I still enjoy trying to make sense of the things I see and trying to put disconnected thoughts and ideas into a coherent shape.

But like many other people these days, I’m also exhausted.

I can’t deal with the way we see a news event take place and almost immediately have to fit it into an ideological frame. Even worse, we are now presented with almost instantaneous information that makes us believe the thing we’ve seen is a fabrication.

Everyone has a self-serving story to tell. Even the ones I agree with annoy me on some level, because I’ve heard too much of it before. The walls are always closing in. It’s always the beginning of the end.

So we end up with live televised events that do not make sense.

We have a war that makes no sense.

We have deep, complicated scandals that, the closer you look at them, make far less sense than most people believe.

The amount of public debt in the United States and other countries around the world is so large, it boggles the mind. How can we continue to spend $1 trillion a year on debt service, roughly the same amount as national defense?

AI is held out as the solution to all of our socio-economic problems, unless it’s a bubble that will crash markets and lead to a deep recession … or not, and then lead to massive unemployment … or not, but then it won’t transform the economy enough to make the business-transformation narratives driving all of the investment make sense, so we’re right back to square one with massive public debt and no plan to ever bring it under control.

Oh, and speaking of AI, there’s also the narrative that it will be the end of humanity. Oddly enough, the AI utopians make the risk of catastrophe part of their stories, because every one of them throughly distrusts the competition and is convinced the world ends if they don’t win.

And back to politics, we were barely minutes removed from the frightening incident of an armed gunman evading security and setting off a panic, and the narrative had already shifted toward construction of the White House ballroom. And then Jimmy Kimmel.

It’s enough to make me wish everyone would shut the fuck up. But I know that’s not going to happen, so I have a gentle suggestion for everyone instead.

Don’t believe anything.

No story ever written or spoken is 100 percent iron clad truth. Even a story built on a foundation of verified facts top to bottom has some element of story teller perspective or time-based contingency attached to it.

This is reality. And it should not be used, in any circumstance, to make the opposite point, that all lies are in some way true. It doesn’t work that way. Lies are a completely different form of fiction and they cannot be bailed out by the elements that make us distrust what we see with our own eyes.

But I’m not concerned with lies at the moment. I’m concerned with stories we embrace because they are comfortable, because they stand in opposition to other stories we dislike, refuse to embrace or have witnessed proven untrue in one form or another.

A narrative can collapse without providing a counter narrative. It is completely reasonable to think that there are a lot of very strange elements to the White House Correspondents Dinner shooting without embracing every conspiracy theory at hand.

And I’m also concerned with our knee jerk instinct to find out that one element of a story is inaccurate, so we throw it all out. Return to first principles: no story is true. There will always be parts of stories that the tellers get wrong, no matter how careful they are.

Everything we read or are told is contingent and shaded by perspective. All grand theories are provisional. Newtonian physics was one of the great discoveries in human history, and yet both General Relativity and Quantum Physics dismantled it. But guess what — Newtonian physics still works. It still holds useful elements even though we know, as a full explanation of the world, it’s not true.

This should be our mindset, that the world is filled with contradictory facts. Grand narratives are always false.

Believe the people who are honest about this, who admit they may be wrong, but still work hard to prove the things they say and believe.

Distrust everyone who will materially gain from the narratives they are selling you.

Understand also that it’s not going to get quieter. Too many people have too much to gain by keeping you confused and exhausted. The world will not make more sense.

Protect your mind first.