Before we start, I have to make a confession.

I’ve been chronically online most of my life. There’s even a Wikipedia page for the term.

But since you’re not here for links to Wikipedia, let me explain what chronically online actually means.

Chronically online means I grew up with the internet and it pretty much shaped the way I consume information. I went down extremely dark internet rabbit holes in my formative years.

Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, the internet was the wild west. You could access pretty much everything, anywhere, all of the time*.

*obligatory shoutout to Bo Burnham, the man who can express the darkest corners of the internet in the catchiest tunes.

Being chronically online can be a blessing and a curse.

When done right, you become EXTREMELY good at parsing information. When done wrong, you become a husk of a human being desperately longing for the heat death of the universe.

I like to think I did it right. And it’s one of the reason I feel I’m doing an amazing job navigating the mountains of information thrown at me at supersonic speeds.

Speaking of throwing information at people.

BOOM!!! LATERAL THINKING EXERCISE!

As usual, an answer at the end.

Explain it like I’m 5 or bust

There’s a worrying trend going around. I’d like to call it pseudo-intelectualism, but that doesn’t do it justice.

It’s a type of hustle used in business, sales, dating and recently politics to captivate an audience that’s fed up with feeling undermined.

The hustle consists of taking a generally accepted stance (financial freedom should be for everyone), explaining the way to achieve that outcome in a convoluted manner (creating a distributed ledger architecture utilizing cryptographic hashing algorithms to maintain an immutable, chronological chain of data blocks) while saying things are “simple” and making sure to discredit any critics by saying they’re either pawns of the system or do not understand how things truly work.

You’ll find this model in places where scams and grifting are common:

• Course selling

• Alpha male counseling (looking at you, bald guy)

• Blockchain / Crypto

• Trading / “Guaranteed investments”

• Politics

And probably more places. Just to clarify, though, that doesn’t mean that EVERYTHING in those industries are scams, but you’re just more likely to encounter them due to their intrinsic nature.

The way you can protect yourself from being a victim or part of something net-negative for humanity is to apply the ELI5 principle.

ELI5 is one of the best communities on Reddit.

ELI5 stands for Explain It Like I’m 5.

Here’s the explanation ELI5 offers for why things feel bad right now, despite specialists saying the economy is doing great.

Reddit community aside, the ELI5 principle works because it forces people who are trying to manipulate you to deconstruct the idea they’re trying to sell you to its core.

And when the idea is stripped of fluff, you’ll know if it’s absurd or not.

For example, I can probably make up a convoluted enough explanation of why the moon landing is a hoax. There’s plenty of those online already, trust me.

But if you’d ask me simplify my conspiracy theory, eventually I’d be forced to remove all the pseudo-science and eventually say: “Yes, I’m saying millions of people across the world, including people you know, kept this secret”.

And that’s when things start getting wobbly. That’s when you know that the person telling you this has more to gain by you trusting them. They need you to believe them because they want your attention and involvement.

The “hoax” itself is irrelevant, your trust isn’t.

If after deconstructing the idea to its core, you still believe in it AND it’s a profoundly contrarian idea, the only reason you should think it’s true is if you are an expert in that field.

If you are not, you are most likely getting conned.