How We Learned to Stop Thinking

Voice & Vision | How We Learned to Stop Thinking, Part 2

If you missed part 1, you can find it here before diving in: Why Everything Feels True Now.

One of the most damaging misunderstandings of our time is the idea that flawed reasoning or thinking only happens with people who are uninformed or unintelligent. It doesn’t. Some of the most confident, articulate, educated and well-read people fall into the same traps as everyone else. Often faster. The problem isn’t a lack of intelligence. It’s that we confuse being surrounded by information with actually understanding it.

Many of us know this person because many of us are this person. We follow the news closely. We read articles, watch clips, skim threads, absorb charts, and keep up with the conversation. We can summarize what happened within minutes of it happening. But when asked why something happened, or how different forces interacted, or what would have to change for a different outcome, the answers get thin. We know the headlines. We struggle with the fundamentals.

Critical thinking was never about being clever. It was about grasping how things work beneath the surface. Not just who to blame, but what incentives, systems, and pressures are actually at play. Headlines deliver sensationalism and punch. Understanding requires consideration and patience. And patience is the one thing our information ecosystem punishes relentlessly.

This is where repetition quietly replaces evidence. When we encounter the same claim again and again, across different platforms and voices, it begins to feel established. Not because it’s been proven, but because it’s familiar. At a certain point, we can’t even remember where we first heard it. The claim detaches from its source and floats freely, reinforced by frequency alone. The brain interprets repetition as reliability. Algorithms are built around that shortcut.

That’s why being “well informed” can sometimes make thinking harder, not easier. The more content we consume, the more confident we feel, and the less likely we are to slow down and question what already fits. Confidence feels like knowledge. Curiosity feels like risk. Being right feels safer than being uncertain. And safety, not truth, is what most systems quietly optimize for.

There’s also a social cost to doubt that rarely gets acknowledged. Questioning a claim from your own side, even carefully, can trigger suspicion or backlash. In many spaces, curiosity is treated as disloyalty. People learn quickly which questions are welcome and which ones aren’t. Silence becomes a form of self-protection. Reasoning doesn’t fail because people are incapable of it. It fails because belonging to the group matters, and doubt can threaten that.

Once a belief becomes part of identity, facts stop being evaluated on their merits. They’re screened for loyalty. Challenging an idea no longer feels like an intellectual exercise. It feels personal. At that point, thinking narrows. Defensiveness replaces exploration. Information isn’t weighed, it’s sorted into friend or enemy. And none of this requires bad faith. It’s a very human response to perceived threat.

This is why critical thinking isn’t primarily an intelligence problem. It’s an emotional safety problem. People don’t stop thinking because they can’t. They stop because thinking becomes uncomfortable, socially costly, or destabilizing. Speed is rewarded, certainty is applauded and doubt is penalized. Over time, the habit of pausing simply erodes.

And this pattern doesn’t belong to any single ideology or movement. It runs through MAGA, anti-MAGA, and everything in between. Different stories, same mechanics. Different villains, same shortcuts. Once you learn to recognize the pattern, it becomes difficult to unsee.

Understanding isn’t about knowing more facts than someone else. It’s about resisting the pressure to decide before you’ve thought. It’s about separating what you’ve been shown from what you actually understand. In a culture trained to react instantly, that separation takes effort.

In the next part, we’ll look at what happens in the moment thinking collapses, how emotion hijacks reasoning in real time, and why learning to pause may be the most important thinking skill we’ve quietly lost.