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You know the account. The one whose captions read like gospel, three thousand comments deep with women agreeing in unison, hearts and fire emojis stacked under a caption that tells you exactly what healing, or worth, or your forties were supposed to look like. You follow her. Some mornings her feed is the first thing you look at before your own thoughts have had a chance to wake up.
This piece draws on Jane Goodall’s publicly told story and an old fable. I shared the ideas, and I used AI to help shape the writing.
This piece sits with Hexagram 17, Following: the season of choosing carefully who and what you follow, because following well is its own kind of leadership. It is also a quiet answer to a question many of us carry: how do I know whose advice to trust?
Checking Your Opinion’s Source
There is an old story about an emperor who paraded through town in clothes that did not exist, convinced by two swindlers that only the wise could see the fabric. Nobody in the crowd wanted to be the one who could not see it, so adult after adult complimented an invisible outfit, right up until a child, with nothing to protect, said the obvious thing out loud, he is not wearing anything. The crowd was not stupid. They were afraid of standing alone in a disagreement nobody else seemed to be having. That is most of what scrolling past a caption that does not actually sit right with you is, agreeing with a crowd rather than risk being the one who says something different.
Replace the swindlers with an algorithm and the parade with a comment section, and the shape barely changes. You read a take about boundaries, or rest, or what healing is supposed to look like by a certain age, and three thousand people have already liked it, so your own quieter, more complicated version of the truth starts to feel like the thing that is wrong, not theirs.
Wise Company, Clear Mind
Not every account that is popular is actually steadying. Some leave your thinking clearer after you close the app. Others leave it muddier, a low hum of inadequacy you cannot quite name until you notice you feel worse after scrolling than before you opened it. The practice here is not quitting the internet. It is checking which voices in your feed have actually earned the trust you have been giving them automatically.
Hold It Lightly
When Jane Goodall arrived at Gombe to study chimpanzees, the accepted belief, the one nearly everyone agreed on, was that tool use was uniquely human. She did not accept it simply because everyone else had. She watched. She recorded what was actually in front of her, chimpanzees stripping leaves from twigs to fish termites out of a nest, and let what she observed revise an assumption the whole field had been treating as settled. She did not storm the consensus or perform certainty of her own either way. She kept looking until the evidence told her something different, then said so plainly.
You do not need Gombe or a research grant to practice the same thing. You need one honest minute before you repost, agree, or quietly absorb someone else’s certainty as your own: is this actually true for me, or does it just feel true because everyone else in the comments says it is?
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Often attributed to Aristotle
Whose voice is actually behind the belief you’re about to act on?
If this is a season you recognize, the free guide, 5 Ways to Trust Your Inner Knowing Again, has more of this, ten minutes at a time, no chart required.
