Good morning, John.

Congrats.  You picked a really amazing month to take off. I am, on the other hand,  absolutely going through it  and in public nonetheless.  But why, like, why in the  aftermath of any major event,  like the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, do I get so stuck on the Internet?  Katherine actually asked  me why this happens to me,  and I didn't know the answer.

The first thing I said was,  I do not think I can explain to you my relationship with the news. But we kept chatting and she, like, wondered if it's that I feel like  I need to make content about it, and so I need to know about it. And I think the answer to that is like, yes, but not the way it sounds.

I don't feel like I need to make content about major things that happen in the world,  but major things happening in  the world makes me think stuff. And then I want to share those thoughts, and sometimes I don't share those thoughts  cause I can't be convinced that they would actually make things any better. So there are lots of thoughts that I don't share,  but I am looking for the thoughts that I have that might be helpful.

And thinking that thought made me realize why I doom scroll.  What I am doing in the moments  after significant events  is not trying to figure out  what content to make about it,  what tweets to tweet. I'm trying to figure   out what world I live in now. The world has clearly changed,  and that unsettles me and  it makes me uncomfortable.

I had a vision of how the world existed and what might be coming. And when that vision gets disturbed, I want to find information that either  lets me settle back into my  previous set of explanations  for how the world works, or it gives me a new understanding of the world.  I'm just looking for the comfort of understanding. Now, this in itself is a form of bias.  It's recency bias.

I'm thinking that the attempted assassination  is a huge deal that's gonna fundamentally change the world because things  that happen recently feel more important than things that happened in the past. And of course, the assassination  attempt is a very big deal.  But also on Sunday, everybody  was saying, like, Donald Trump  is definitely gonna win. Now, I basically texted that to you.

But now we've seen that the assassination attempt  does not seem to have changed  the polling numbers much. But also what I saw as I doom scrolled was legitimately stuff that did help me understand  what world were heading into. Most importantly, like the  identity of the murderer.  He was white and American  and not a recent immigrant.  And I am of the opinion that if he had been any other kind of person,  despite the fact that it  still would have been like  one disturbed guy pulling one trigger, the narrative would have been entirely different.

Now, look, a different set of identities for this guy would not have changed the reality  and the tragedy of what happened, but it would have changed the narrative. It would have given us more to yell at each other about and more reasons  for people to be scared of people that they are already overly afraid of. So I feel weird about saying this, but the fact that he was a white American,  born and raised, did take the temperature down, and that was an important thing to find out.

And that's broadly the kind  of stuff we're searching for.  We want to know not just how bad it is for the people injured or killed,  but how bad it's going to be for everyone. How much more is this going to increase  the temperature at an already  very hot moment in America? And so I will say, though,  keep watching after I finish this sentence.

There is something rational about doom scrolling.  It isn't just a self destructive act, it is a self protective act. Well, but we have to recognize that when we try to understand some   new part of our world, we are doing two things. We're taking information and  changing our understanding  of reality based on that information.

But just as much, our brains   are fighting to fit information into our previous conception of reality.  I want to talk about this, but I also desperately do   not want to get into the weeds of conspiracy theories here,  because those people can get a little scary. So let's just take one single thing. Was Thomas Crooks more of a progressive  or more of a conservative?

If you're progressive,  it's gonna be more comfortable  and better for your cause  if he was more conservative. And if you're more conservative, it's gonna be more comfortable   and better for your cause. For him to be progressive.

And one of the very first things that came out after his identity was his voter registration  and political donations. He was a registered Republican,  and he once gave dollar 15 to a progressive get out the vote organization. He was also wearing a shirt from  a gun focused YouTube channel.  Then later we heard that he once told a classmate that classmate was stupid for supporting Trump.

And now we have enough information  to pick and choose from to build whichever narrative we would like. And also, we can work to discredit the information that we don't like  so we don't have to believe it. Like, you might see a conservative saying, no, he only registered as a Republican  in order to vote against Trump in the primary, which I don't know, maybe.  But anyone saying that has  no idea if it's true or not.  And also, being, like, a huge fan of guns isn't generally a liberal thing.

And also, there are almost  certainly people watching  this right now who think that crooks donation to a progressive organization was actually  some 69 year old in Pittsburgh, but it was Thomas Crooks, the assassin.  Four years ago, when he was 17, there was a tweet that went viral that  linked the donation with the 69 year old, but it didn't actually link anything to anyone.  It just posted the fact  that there was a 69 year old  in Pittsburgh who's named Thomas Crooks, who, by the way, I hope is doing well  after what has had to have  been a pretty weird week. But the record of the donation  listed Crooks address,  it had just been blacked out  on the social media screenshot,  for obvious reasons. So, yes, it was him.

The point is, there's enough information,  supposition, and incorrect  information to tell either story. But not so much that these stories became a broader shared narrative.  Instead, people saw the things that the folks in their bubbles shared. And instead of a shared narrative, a shared version of reality,  people get to form their specially crafted comfortable realities.

We aren't just trying to figure  out what universe we're living in.  And to redefine our stories to fit with reality, we inevitably pick and choose the pieces  of reality that fit the stories we are comfortable in and already believe.  And I know this because  there's a third thing here. For me, this means looking at this and saying,  that does not seem to be a guy who hated Donald Trump in particular. It's a guy who seems to have hated everything.

He googled where Joe Biden was gonna be. He googled where Donald Trump was gonna be. Also Merrick Garland and Christopher Wray  and an unnamed member of the British royal family.

And that sounds to me like a guy  who has been convinced of by  himself or by external forces,  that everything is terrible and that it would be a good thing to just hurt the world. But look, in that thing I just said, if that's not really appealing to you,  that's us doing literally the same thing,  fitting the facts to my existing  conception of the world. Because I am a little sick of people tearing down absolutely everything at every opportunity.

And I'm sick of the nihilism it  creates in our society generally. And I am sick of the space that it leaves for strong men to come in and say,  only I can fix this, but only if you give me all the power. Because, look, there's a fourth option here and I'm wondering if you can even identify it.

It is the one that's definitely true. Not that he was progressive  not that he was conservative  not that he was lonely  and despondent and just wanted to be violent. Can you guess what it was?

It's that we don't know.  It's definitely the truth and also the hardest thing to live inside of. We don't know sucks. Not knowing is so powerful but also uncomfortable.  It's so uncomfortable that I just don't see people doing it much if at all not in public,  not loudly, not on social   media and that's why we scroll because we hate not knowing.

Twitter and its many voices are there to give us what we want. The illusion that our stories are true and that the future is knowable  but we don't get to have that. If you want to have an allegiance to truth you have to trade in the  comfort of constant certainty.

John, I'll see you in August.