About a year ago, I came across a reel from a creator I'd never encountered before. She was talking about media consumption—specifically, the volume of voices we're exposed to online. She had no particular authority on the topic—no research to point to, no professional background that would have made her opinion especially worth seeking out. But I watched the reel all the way through anyway, and I found myself thinking about it for days after.

The message was straightforward: there are a lot of voices on the internet, and we, as human beings, are probably not meant to hear that many in a given day. I kept returning to this idea. Who are all these people? Why am I listening to them? And, more to the point—was any of it actually doing me any good?

The irony is not lost on me. A stranger on the internet told me I should be more skeptical of strangers on the internet, and it was the most persuasive thing I'd heard in months. (And I am, of course, also a stranger on the internet—so take everything that follows with whatever sized grain of salt you see fit.)

But I was in a bit of a rut at the time, and I could recognize that the infinite scroll was not helping. My feed surfaced exactly the things I was already turning over, and then it buried me in unsolicited advice about what to do about them. Every few weeks, I'd feel the pull to deactivate entirely. I never did. But the impulse kept returning, and it made me start asking a question I hadn't really put much thought into before: how much of what I was consuming was I actually choosing?

I always thought I was good at filtering.

I'm selective about whose words I spend time with. I don't follow lifestyle gurus or relationship coaches or career advice accounts. If I'm going to let an idea in, I want it to arrive from someone with credentials that go beyond a well-lit backdrop and a confident delivery.

I thought myself to be relatively immune from the algorithm. I regarded most of it as background noise; something to scroll through before bed and not something worth thinking about.

But passive exposure is still exposure. And noise is not neutral just because you've decided not to engage with it.

And I realized, then, that some of what I was telling myself—about what I wanted, what I deserved, and what I was doing wrong—was not entirely mine. It had seeped in from somewhere. A lot of somewheres.

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In 1985, cultural critic Neil Postman wrote a book titled Amusing Ourselves to Death. In it, he argued that the then-emerging medium of television was producing what he called "disinformation"—not misinformation in the sense of deliberate falsehood, but something arguably more insidious: information that was "misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial," creating "the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing" (Postman 107).

He also wrote that for the first time in human history, technology had created an "information glut," which meant that simultaneously, people were faced with "a diminished social and political potency" (Postman 68). The more we were told, the less we could do with any of it. The ratio of information to meaningful action had collapsed.

Postman was writing about the news. But the structure of the problem has not changed, only the delivery mechanism. We have traded the six o'clock broadcast for the infinite scroll. The talking heads have been replaced by content creators whose chief qualification, in many cases, is that they have a phone and an opinion and enough conviction to say the thing with their chest. And we are all, to varying degrees, downstream of it.

There's a version of this that feels solvable. Just curate better. Just be more intentional. Just follow the right people.

But I think the problem is upstream of curation. It's not just who we're listening to. It's the sheer quantity of listening we're doing—the way we have normalized the constant intake of other people's frameworks for living, applied to our lives by people who know nothing about our lives.

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This brings me to the part of the argument that I suspect some people will find contentious.

I think we need to be significantly more selective about whose advice we actually take to heart. Not just whose content we consume, but whose counsel we weight—whose opinion on how we should live, love, work, and move through the world we actually let land with authority.

My answer, tentative as it is, is: almost no one. And within that almost, a very small group.

Mentors. People who have stood somewhere close to where you're standing and made it through—not just survived but emerged with something intact and worth having. People whose lives you would actually want, not just whose advice sounds good in the abstract. The test is not whether someone can articulate a compelling principle. The test is whether the principle is legible in how they live.

And friends, sometimes. But not all friends about everything. This is, I think, the opinion that gets me in trouble. But I hold it anyway.

The people I love dearest are not always the people whose judgment I should be deferring to on every question. Advice is domain-specific. The friend I'd call about a career decision is not necessarily the friend I'd call about a relationship, and vice versa—not because I trust one more than the other, but because trust without relevant experience is just affection with an opinion attached.

I don't take dating advice from the friend who is perpetually unhappy in his own relationships. I don't take career advice from the friend who hasn't figured out what she wants professionally. This isn't a judgment on them as people. It's a recognition that the credential has to match the question.

This is not a hierarchy of affection. It is a hierarchy of relevance.

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I am not arguing for insularity. There is real value in encountering a perspective that makes you genuinely uncomfortable—the dinner with a stranger over rigatoni alla vodka, the reel from someone you'll never follow, the book that rearranges something you thought was settled. I would not have encountered half of what I believe if I'd only listened to people who already agreed with me.

But there is a difference between encountering a perspective and letting it quietly author your understanding of yourself.

I think we've lost track of that distinction. We've made ourselves so porous to other people's ideologies that we've forgotten to ask, with any regularity, whether the ideologies fit. Whether the person offering it has earned the right to speak on this particular question. Whether the confidence with which it's delivered has anything to do with its validity.

Postman's worry—that we were consuming information that created "the illusion of knowing something"—has not gone away. It has just changed shape. We are now very well-informed about how we are supposed to feel, what we are supposed to want, who we are supposed to become. And most of that information is arriving from strangers and delivered with the conviction of someone who knows us well.

They don't.

The people who know you well are a very small group. Everyone else is just a stranger with an opinion.