The other day, I was talking to a friend who asked if I’d seen the news about Washington potentially changing its name back to the “Redskins.” I hadn’t. So he gave me the rundown, saying that media outlets were reporting support for the change from First Peoples themselves. I was stunned.

Naturally, I did a quick search. And right at the top? Headlines from mainstream sources saying exactly that. But I’ve learned to dig deeper. Once I scrolled past the top headlines, I saw the other side. Articles showing the same communities saying what they’ve always said: #StillNotYourMascot.

It’s just one example of a pattern I keep seeing. Conflicting stories, contradictory claims, and a constant stream of information where it’s hard to tell what’s actually true and what’s just being repeated enough to sound true.

A few months ago, one of my newsblogs quoted a government website that listed Donald Trump as the president responsible for the development and mass distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine, helping to end the pandemic. He wasn’t in office when the vaccine was distributed. But there it was, presented as fact on an official source.

The Information Crisis Is Accelerating

With AI now generating more content than ever — much of it indistinguishable from fact-based reporting — this problem isn’t going away. If anything, it’s accelerating. These days, believing anything without triple-checking feels like a gamble. And who’s got time for that?

The challenge isn’t just volume. It’s that misinformation often spreads faster than corrections. It’s that our cognitive biases make us more likely to believe information that confirms what we already think. It’s that platforms profit from engagement, not accuracy, so controversial content gets amplified while nuanced truth gets buried.

All of this — the conflicting headlines, the revisionist history, the artificially generated content — made something click for me. We need a different way to think. Not faster. Not harder. Just cleaner.

What Clean Thinking Actually Means

Clean thinking is a strategic approach for navigating the pervasive disinformation, confusion, and manipulation that characterizes our digital world. It’s about rising above the overwhelm and staying grounded in truth in an ecosystem designed to distract.

But it’s more than just fact-checking. Clean thinking means:

Recognizing your triggers before they hijack your judgment. When you feel that immediate urge to share, argue, or panic, that’s your cue to pause. Emotional reactions are often the enemy of clean thinking.

Filtering information through your values, not just your feelings. What matters to you beyond the immediate outrage or excitement? What principles guide your decisions when the noise dies down?

Understanding the patterns that shape your thinking. We all have mental shortcuts and biases. Clean thinking means becoming aware of them so you can make meaning for yourself instead of just absorbing what you’re told.

Trusting your own discernment while remaining open to being wrong. This isn’t about becoming stubborn or isolated. It’s about developing enough confidence in your thinking process to take action even when everything feels uncertain. Because in a world built to flood you with doubt and noise, being able to move forward anyway? That’s power.

Why This Matters Now

We’ve been conditioned to over-consume information, second-guess our instincts, and defer to the so-called “experts” in the room rather than learning how to think clearly for ourselves. This creates a dependency that leaves us vulnerable to manipulation.

Clean thinking looks different in practice for everyone, but it might mean pausing before sharing that viral post. Asking a clarifying question instead of matching someone’s outrage. Choosing not to spiral just because everyone else is. It means getting comfortable saying, ‘I don’t know enough about this yet to have an opinion.’

The Strategic Advantage

Here’s what I’ve learned. Clean thinking is both strategic and a competitive advantage. While others are caught in cycles of reaction and confusion, you’re able to see patterns more clearly. You make better decisions because you’re not operating from a place of information overwhelm or emotional hijacking.

Clean thinking allows you to ask better questions, spot inconsistencies others miss, and trust your own process with enough confidence to take the next step. It takes practice, curiosity, and discernment but these are skills that compound over time.

Moving Forward

The systems around us are designed to capture and monetize our attention, often by keeping us confused, outraged, or dependent on external validation for our thinking. So what do we do with that?

If the world is built to profit from our confusion (and it is), then clean thinking may be the most strategic move you can make. This is not about withdrawing from the world or becoming paranoid about information. It’s about building thinking that lets you move through the world by choice rather than default.

I’ll be writing more about specific techniques and practices for developing this kind of thinking, but for now, I’ll leave you with this. The next time you feel that familiar pull toward outrage or certainty about something you just read, try pausing instead. Ask yourself what you truly know versus what you’re being told to feel or believe.

As Viktor Frankl brilliantly noted, that pause — the space between stimulus and response — is where your power lies. And it’s where clean thinking begins.

#FlyAboveSoarBeyond