When Trust Is Gone

Living parallel lives in an age of too much information and too little certainty.

Does 2026 feel like the longest year to you, just eight weeks in?

On a global level, it already feels like we have lived an entire year. The news cycle moves so quickly, with so many competing narratives, that keeping up feels almost impossible. And layered on top of that is something even more exhausting: not knowing who or what to believe.

That uncertainty ages you in a way lack of sleep never could.

I keep trying to think of another time in modern history that felt like this. Yes, the obvious comparisons come to mind, but we did not live through those moments ourselves. We do not fully know what it felt like day to day to exist inside that level of uncertainty.

What I do know is this: lately I feel like I am living parallel lives.

In one life, I am consuming news from multiple sources, trying to piece together what is signal and what is noise, what is fact and what is spin.

In the other life, I am simply going about my day. Teaching. Creating. Answering emails. Having perfectly normal conversations as if the ground beneath all of us does not feel just a little less steady than it used to.

Maybe that is the strangest part of this moment.

It is not just the volume of information. It is not even the severity of the headlines. It is the growing realization that trust itself feels… thinner.

There was a time when most of us, regardless of politics, had at least some shared understanding of who the “good actors” were in a situation and who were not. Today, that clarity feels harder to come by. The lines blur. The narratives compete. And ordinary people are left doing the exhausting work of constant interpretation.

So the question becomes: how does trust rebuild once it erodes?

History tells us it can. But history also tells us it does not happen quickly, and it does not happen accidentally.

For now, many of us are simply doing the best we can… living our parallel lives and hoping that clarity, eventually, finds its way back to us.

I set out to write this piece as an allegory. Something loose. Something layered. Something where readers might not immediately know what I meant.

But then I remembered… Animal Farm was already written.

Which raises a harder question:

Are we living it in the longest year ever… only eight weeks in?