EN BG

Sensemaking

You live in a world that is actively trying to make sense for you — and that should concern you.

Sensemaking is your ability to take complex, contradictory, overwhelming information and form a coherent picture of what is actually going on. Not what someone tells you is going on. Not what feels right. What you can genuinely piece together by examining evidence, context, and incentives for yourself.

This is bigger than "critical thinking." Critical thinking is a skill you apply to a single claim. Sensemaking is the whole operating system. It includes how you choose your sources, how you handle uncertainty, how you notice when your emotions are doing the reasoning for you, and how you update your views when new evidence arrives. It is the difference between passively receiving a worldview and actively constructing one.

The reason this matters now more than ever is that the institutions that used to do sensemaking on your behalf — journalism, academia, government — are compromised by the same incentive structures and attention economics that distort everything else. You cannot outsource your understanding of reality to systems that are optimised for engagement, profit, or political survival. You have to build your own capacity. Not to become an expert on everything — but to become someone who can tell the difference between signal and noise.

References