Trust nothing. Even when you find some influencer that says all the things you agree with, don't trust or follow that person. They will build a following, then insert a new message, and half the herd will go with it. The only things should believe (well, you be you, but this is how I think) are what you can verify yourself and then build your own conclusions up from that. 99% of articles don't present anything real - they just invoke experts and sound authoritative. F that... You deserve better.

An example is when I figured out that climate change was a hoax, at least in part. Not all worries are unfounded, I'm not saying that. But as its presented, its basically a hoax and it benefits certain people. So, I was teaching a science class, and I was really making an effort to teach them to be inquisitive. There was no curriculum, barely any oversight, no books - every aspect of the class was entirely up to me. It was in China, and it was a brand new private school, and I was the wrong guy for the job, but sometimes that's just how things happen. Anyhow... I wanted to teach them to be environmentally conscious, so I started building lessons about the environment and human impact. But I had never closely examined my beliefs, and I had to be able to answer "why" questions. So I dig into it... I found data from ice cores, was really puzzled why it told a different story than the media presents, I emailed professors, one of which was Dr. Ridd (iirc) in Australia, and he emailed back a fucking data dump on corals in the great barrier reef... And basically, the whole narrative is a big fucking lie. Corals aren't dying, they're thriving. CO2 doesn't cause desertification - it does exactly the opposite, and its ability to warm the planet diminishes at higher levels. It is still potentially bad to breathe at higher levels, so we should level off emissions at some point, but its also necessary for our lungs to work. So the picture that began to appear was that CO2 is about as harmless as anything can be, but we're all told to be terrified of it, meanwhile thousands of chemicals that are carcinogens go unregulated and no one pays attention. I found a US government website that estimated 100k chemicals being dumped into the environment that have never been studied in any way.

I could go on. The point is, I trusted the narrative, but when I looked for myself, something totally different was going on. Don't trust anything. Investigate it yourself.

Think of narratives like this - why would a narrative ever be needed if it was the truth? True things are self evident. You need a narrative when you deviate from truth.