I wrote a book about not knowing things anymore
Once upon a time, I believed in facts the way other people believe in gravity. Utterly. Unconsciously. With the profound confidence of someone who has never been weightless.
Then gravity stopped working.
Not all at once. Not in some dramatic collapse that would make for a satisfying origin story. More like discovering, one Tuesday morning over coffee, that the floor you’d been standing on for forty years was actually a very convincing hologram projected by people who’d figured out that confidence and competence look identical from a distance.
Which, if you think about it, is considerably worse.
The book nobody asked me to write
The Collapse of Knowledge started as a question I couldn’t stop asking myself: what happens when someone trained to spot bullshit discovers their bullshit detector has been turned into a weapon against them?
I spent decades as a scientist. Proper peer-review-and-replication scientist. I could identify pseudoscience from three suburbs away. Unfalsifiable claims made my left eye twitch. I had Karl Popper’s philosophy of science tattooed on my professional identity, and I wore it like armour.
That armour, it turns out, had holes I couldn’t see. Holes that were put there by people who understood exactly how it was built.
This book is about those holes.
What you’ll find inside
Twelve chapters. No easy answers. A fair amount of self-mockery, because if you can’t laugh at the absurdity of a trained epistemologist who got fooled by YouTube’s algorithm, you probably shouldn’t be writing about knowledge at all.
I trace the whole arc, from my upbringing in scientific certainty through the seduction of being right (it’s basically a dopamine addiction, and I was hooked), through the first cracks that appeared when five different psychiatric medications failed to treat a condition I didn’t actually have.
There’s a chapter about moving to Vietnam and discovering that Eastern approaches to knowledge had been comfortable with paradox for centuries while Western thinking was still demanding that contradictions pick a side.
There’s a chapter about YouTube becoming a counterfeit university, where confidence has been successfully rebranded as competence and the algorithm has appointed itself Dean of Everything.
There’s one about micro-truths and macro-lies, which is the sophisticated new technique of building cathedrals of misinformation using nothing but verified facts. Every brick is real. The building is a hallucination.
And yes, there’s a chapter about AI evangelism. Because I did it again. Fell for the same pattern I fell for with social media. Stood on the same stage, different technology, same breathless excitement, same failure to check for exit signs.
I should have known better. Chapter ten is called ‘How I became John the Baptist again, and yes, I should have known better.’
Why this book exists
Because I keep meeting intelligent people who feel like they’re losing their minds. Not because they’ve become stupid, but because the systems we built to separate truth from nonsense have been compromised in ways that make individual verification nearly impossible.
I started noticing a new kind of anxiety in my psychology practice. Epistemic anxiety, I call it. The distress that comes from not knowing what’s true anymore, especially about things that directly affect your wellbeing.
Traditional anxiety responds to traditional interventions. Epistemic anxiety is different. It’s not irrational fear. It’s the perfectly rational recognition that nobody, including the experts, can reliably tell you what’s real anymore.
That’s not a mental health problem. That’s an accurate reading of the situation.
And if your accurate reading of the situation looks like a mental health problem, then perhaps the situation, not your reading of it, is what needs treatment.
What this book isn’t
It isn’t a guide to thinking more clearly. There are enough of those, and most of them are written by people who haven’t noticed that their own critical thinking frameworks are part of the problem.
It isn’t a manifesto against science. Science remains the best method we have for understanding reality. The issue isn’t the method. The issue is what happens when the method gets captured by incentive structures that reward continued confusion over actual understanding.
And it isn’t optimistic in the usual sense. I don’t promise you’ll emerge from these pages with better tools for navigating the information landscape. I promise you’ll feel less alone in finding it bewildering.
Sometimes that’s enough.
The ending might surprise you
The final chapter asks a question I spent eleven chapters avoiding: what if the solution isn’t better frameworks or more sophisticated analysis? What if it’s just stopping for a bit?
Going for a walk. Taking photographs. Having coffee without checking whether the health claims about coffee have updated since breakfast.
The universe spent billions of years evolving consciousness. The least we can do is use it thoughtfully rather than turning it into an optimisation project.
You’re allowed to just be here. The collapse of knowledge isn’t something you solve. It’s something you survive. And survival doesn’t require winning every epistemological battle.
It requires knowing which battles to fight, which to walk away from, and which to acknowledge you’re too tired for today.
Read it on your device
The Collapse of Knowledge is available to read on your phone, tablet, or computer as part of a paid subscription to Quiet Half. No extra purchase needed. Just subscribe, and the book is yours to read whenever you like, wherever you like.
If you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you. The book is waiting for you.
If you’re not yet, well. I wonder if a book about the collapse of everything we thought we knew might be worth the price of a decent coffee.