It’s been a while since I’ve written anything, mainly because I’ve been busy observing society’s slow motion nose dive. Now that I’ve collected my thoughts and rolled my eyes enough times to qualify as exercise, I’m ready to talk about where the world is going and why common sense seems to have packed its bags and left.
Common sense didn’t die quietly.
It wasn’t a peaceful passing, surrounded by loved ones, with a nice send off and a few kind words. It was dragged into the street, beaten with a ring light, filmed vertically, and uploaded with the caption “be kind.”
And it got two hundred thousand likes.
That’s where we are now. A world where the most basic, obvious truths get treated like fringe conspiracy theories, and the dumbest ideas imaginable get celebrated like they just cured something. Say something that used to be blindingly obvious, the sky is blue, fire is hot, maybe don’t lick the railing on the tube, and you’ll get a reply explaining why you’re wrong, insensitive, and probably a bit of a bigot for saying it.
The Rise of the Proudly Clueless
There was a time when not knowing something was mildly embarrassing. You’d keep your mouth shut, nod along, maybe go home and look it up later so nobody caught you out again. It was a whole system. It worked fine for thousands of years.
Now, not knowing something isn’t a gap to fill. It’s a personality trait. People will tell you, dead serious, that they “did their own research,” and what they actually mean is they watched a nineteen second video made by a man in his car who can’t pronounce the word he’s currently explaining. No footnotes. No sources. Just vibes and a confident tone of voice, because apparently that’s all a fact needs these days to be considered true.
Then they’ll argue with you about it. Loudly. Because somewhere along the way, volume replaced evidence as the thing that wins an argument. Shout it enough times and it stops mattering whether it’s correct.
When Feelings Became Facts
Here’s where it really went off the rails. Common sense didn’t stand a chance the moment feelings got promoted to facts.
If someone feels offended, you were wrong, regardless of what you actually said or meant. If someone feels unsafe, reality itself needs adjusting to make room for that feeling, regardless of whether anything unsafe is actually happening. And if someone feels like an expert, well, congratulations, apparently that’s the only qualification required now. Feelings used to be a useful signal about how a person was doing. Now they’re treated as a substitute for being right.
I see this most clearly from the other side of a therapy room. Someone will sit across from me convinced that their anxiety is proof of danger, that if it feels catastrophic it must be catastrophic, and my job suddenly becomes untangling the difference between a feeling and a fact without making them feel unheard for having the feeling in the first place.
It is a genuinely tricky needle to thread. Validate the feeling too much and you validate the false belief attached to it. Dismiss the feeling and you have just confirmed their fear that nobody is listening. Somewhere in the middle is the actual work, and it is exhausting on a good day.
We’ve built a culture around adults who believe, genuinely believe, that the entire world should quietly rearrange itself around their mood on any given Tuesday. And the maddening part is how well it’s working for them.
The Experts Nobody Asked For
There used to be a meaningful difference between knowing something and having an opinion about it. One took years, training, mistakes, humility. The other took a phone and forty seconds of free time.
That difference is basically gone now. Everyone is an expert on everything, all at once, with total confidence.
Nutrition? They know. Never studied it, can’t tell you what a macro actually is, but they know. Geopolitics? They know, because they saw a thread. Mental health? They absolutely know, having self diagnosed everything from a TikTok quiz between episodes of a true crime podcast. Space travel? Obviously they know, they watched the documentary with the nice narrator.
I get a version of this most weeks, professionally. Someone arrives having already diagnosed themselves from a fourteen part video series, ready to discuss their attachment style like it is a horoscope reading, and my actual job for the first twenty minutes is not therapy, it is gently walking back six months of confident misinformation before we can even get to the real thing underneath it.
Not because I want to take their language away from them. Because the label they picked usually is not even the right shape for what is actually going on, and building a treatment plan on the wrong shape helps nobody.
Common sense used to whisper something helpful in your ear at this point. Something like, “maybe defer to the person who has actually done this for twenty years.” But common sense is dead, so instead we get life advice from someone who thinks a calorie deficit is a government conspiracy.
The Worship of Stupidity
The really galling bit isn’t that stupidity exists. It always has. It’s that we’ve started rewarding it like it’s a skill.
Do something catastrophically idiotic on camera these days and you don’t get consequences, you get reach. Millions of views, a sponsorship deal within the week, and eventually a podcast where you dispense wisdom to people twice your age who somehow still show up to listen. Fail spectacularly enough and fail loudly enough, and the internet will hand you a microphone.
Meanwhile, the person quietly doing the sensible thing, showing up, working hard, not setting anything on fire for content, gets told they’re privileged, or boring, or “just not relatable.” Being competent has somehow become a personality flaw. Common sense didn’t die of natural causes. It got out-competed by an algorithm that simply prefers a car crash to a well maintained car.
Rules For The New World
If you want to survive in this new era of upside down logic, you’ll need to learn the new commandments, because the old rules of thinking clearly have been quietly retired.
Never say the obvious thing out loud, it’s considered offensive now. Never question anyone’s nonsense, that’s rude, and rudeness is the only sin left that still counts. Never expect basic competence from anyone, that’s elitist thinking. And whatever you do, never assume people are capable of working something out for themselves, because you’ll be reminded, often furiously, that they are not.
Point out that any of this is ridiculous and you’ll be accused of negativity, or toxicity, or “not supporting the community.” Which community, exactly? The community of people who need a warning label on a hot drink because otherwise they’d assume it was refreshing?
The Disappearance Of Responsibility
Common sense used to say something simple and slightly uncomfortable, which was that your choices have consequences, and those consequences belong to you.
That idea has been quietly buried too. Now the consequences always belong to someone else. Your diet is the fault of the food industry. Your money troubles are the fault of the economy, or capitalism, or your landlord, or all three at once depending on the day. Your terrible decision last Friday night is somehow, mysteriously, also not your fault.
Responsibility got rebranded as judgment. Accountability got rebranded as cruelty. And common sense, the thing that used to gently remind you that you’re an adult and adults deal with their own mess, got rebranded as something bordering on hate speech.
This is the bit that keeps me up some nights, professionally speaking. I sit with people who have built an entire identity out of being the exception, the one whose situation is different, whose feelings are the evidence, whose reality does not have to bend to anyone else’s version of events.
I have to decide, most sessions, whether the kind thing is to gently walk them toward the door marked reality, or whether kindness has already run its course and what they actually need is someone to open that door and nudge them through it, firmly, before they build another room onto the house they are avoiding leaving.
I would like to say I always know which one it is. I do not. Nobody warns you in training that half the job is deciding how hard to push someone toward a truth they have spent years building an identity around avoiding.
The Final Nail
Common sense didn’t die because people got stupider overnight. People have always had their moments. It died the day enough people decided, collectively, that reality itself should be optional.
Not flexible. Not open to interpretation, the way a decent argument or a grey area is. Optional. As in, if reality is inconvenient, you’re allowed to simply opt out of it.
If a fact hurts someone’s feelings, the fact gets treated as the problem, not the feelings. If the truth is awkward, silence gets treated as kindness. If logic threatens to get in the way of a good story, logic is the thing that has to go. And so here we sit, in a world where the most obvious, unremarkable truths, the kind your grandmother could have told you for free, now require a disclaimer, a trigger warning, and occasionally a helpline number at the bottom of the screen.
And here is the uncomfortable bit I will admit to, because pretending otherwise would make me exactly the kind of fake I have just spent this entire piece complaining about.
I will tell a client, and I will tell you, that I am not trying to change anyone. I am just trying to help people see reality more clearly. Which is, if you squint, precisely the sentence every ideologue, guru and algorithm has used to justify rearranging someone else’s mind for them. The line between showing someone the truth and telling them what to think is thinner than anyone in the business of ‘fixing people’ would like to admit. I still believe there is a real difference. I just think it is worth admitting how easily it could be lost.
What’s Left
Here’s the good news, because there is some. Common sense isn’t completely extinct. It’s just gone quiet. It’s still out there, tucked away in the people who’ve given up trying to fix the entire internet and have instead put their energy into just staying sane themselves.
You can’t save everyone. You genuinely cannot argue a stranger out of a belief they built their whole identity around over one comment thread, so stop trying, it’s a waste of an evening. But you can hold onto your own grip on reality, quietly, without announcing it, without needing a round of applause for it.
That was always the deal with common sense anyway. It never needed permission. It never needed a hashtag. It just needed one person willing to look at something obvious and say so, out loud, and then get on with their day regardless of who disagreed.
You’re allowed to be that person. Nobody’s going to give you a badge for it. You’ll just sleep better.
Thoughts?
