You're A Skeptic. Now What?

You’ve seen enough mirages not to trust your senses. You’ve observed enough cultures to realize how contingent your own is. Your therapy sessions have made you realize the extent to which your worldview is a product of your upbringing, while your study of sociology has made you see how culturally conditioned you are to place your trust in some guy with small glasses and a certificate on his wall.

You’ve experienced altered states of consciousness and no longer prefer waking to dreaming, sobriety to intoxication, clarity to cloudiness. Perhaps understanding is a function of mood, you think.

You want to know what to do with all your doubts.

Do you double down on the status quo and take refuge in the stability of tradition and norms, in consensus? Maybe social proof, the wisdom of the crowd, is less wrong than what you can come up with on your own, using your own limited, measly brain? In any case, even if it’s wrong, you can at least get by miming the next person.

Or do you take a leap of faith into something unknown and inchoate, just following a very personal feeling or some small minority of “thought rebels”?

If there’s no way to confirm anything, you might as well follow your heart? What does the crowd know, anyways? It’s just as ignorant as you, but with the disadvantage of not being you. Besides, many of your heroes are contrarians, and you’d like to be like them one day. On the other hand, you know you are guilty of sample bias. Most contrarians are wrong. Many still are right, but not availed in their own lifetimes.