What can we trust?

I find working out how to determine what information we can trust when trying to determine what is real and what is not can be extraordinarily difficult. It causes me a great deal of anxiety to think about how unreliable the basis of our information is. Leaving alone the fallibility of our senses themselves when watching the media or reading articles on the net it seems extremely confusing. It seems at some point you just have to work out who your going to trust and who you’re not. I, like most people, do not have the time or energy to properly investigate every piece of information I encounter, yet we must make decisions. We must decided whether to take notice of a statement or dismiss it. To give it credibility or to ignore it. How certain do we need to be in order to make our decisions. I think society can be incredibly harsh when judging people for the decisions they make. We come down hard on people for making wrong decisions under the assumption that everyone is aware of the same information and so when they make a mistake we would not have they are suddenly a bad person or someone in need of reprimand. It seems the older I get the more difficult it is for me to take a strong opinion on any issue because of this lingering uncertainty that plagues every decision I make. Am I supporting a just cause or being manipulated by a collective madness? This fog of confusion is the only thing that seems clear to me as something we must fight. The only cause I feel I can feel truly passionate about is the quest for truth and the eradication of ignorance. I’m filled with frustration when I see people proposing clear fallacies as the truth or asserting things as fact without basis. It seems hard enough to determine what’s real without this kind of thing going on. I think one of the worst parts about this is that I feel that I myself am guilty of jumping to conclusion well before I have grounds and making assertions which are not sound. Sometimes I wonder if any of us can be completely honest. Do the pressures exerted upon us inevitably mean that we will always betray the truth from time to time. Perhaps truth telling and believing is a skill that none of us will ever truly master but a continual endeavor in which we must always improve.