Very soon, we’re going to reach a point where it’s almost impossible to tell what’s real and what isn’t on the internet. Not just photos or videos, but entire stories, voices, “evidence”, even people. Anything that appears on a screen can be fabricated convincingly.
And the more I think about this, the more it feels obvious to me why everything had to shift before we got here. Why so many were jolted awake over the last few years, why trust collapsed and the spell broke.
Because if this level of AI had arrived while we were still fully asleep, still outsourcing our thinking, still believing that if something looked official or was repeated enough it must be true, we would have been completely trapped. There would have been no way out.
What’s changed is not the technology, it’s us.
We no longer believe just because we’re told to. We question instinctively now. We notice when something doesn’t sit right, when it dosn’t add up, even if we can’t immediately articulate why. And we’ve learned that almost everything we thought was true, was actually a lie.
So we are better prepared for a time now where we won’t be able to rely on “proof” in the old sense, or on ‘experts’, or perceived ‘facts’, we won’t even be able to trust our own eyes! So something else will have to guide us.
The Awakening was the preparation; a kind of training period before the world became fully synthetic. A time to reignite our inner compass, our discerning abilities, our intuition and our innate ‘knowing’ before things became so blurred that we would have never been able to escape the illusion.
The real split isn’t political or ideological, it’s internal.
Some people will cling harder than ever to the illusion. They’ll demand certainty from screens, labels and systems that can no longer give it, and they’ll feel increasingly angry and disoriented when that certainty keeps collapsing.
Whilst we, on the other hand, stopped looking outward for permission to know what’s real, a long time ago. Instead we pause and feel and sense when something is off, even without evidence. Not because we’re special, but because we’ve been forced to learn how to listen to something deeper.
It’s taken us years to get here. Years of unlearning and relearning, of researching and questioning. Years of anger, outrage, pain and frustration. Years of being rejected, of losing friends, of being labelled crazy, of sitting in discomfort and of losing trust in pretty much everything… except ourselves. And that was the point of it all; to regain and rebuild our inner ability to navigate life with our inner compass as the sole guide.
It wasn’t easy training, but it was necessary. And now, more than ever before, our training is going to be put to the test.
