Looking for What's Wrong: When Verification Replaces Experience

In the past few days, two seemingly unrelated experiences had one thing in common - which led me to a bigger question about who decides what's real anymore.

First, an article about detecting AI-generated content. Look for em dashes, it advised. Blue diamond bullet points. Particular word patterns. I've used em dashes for years. I hunted down those blue diamonds because I love color. My word choices have always been unconventional.

Then a talk show caller insisted some public emails were obviously AI-generated. The evidence? The writer used "as" instead of "because." Nobody does that, the caller said with absolute certainty.

Except I do.

For a moment, I got concerned: Are people reading my writing and thinking I'm AI? Is that what people think of me?

Then I started wondering about the real question underneath: Why can't I enjoy music without knowing how it was produced? Why can't we hear a message and consider its meaning before investigating how it was created? When did we stop trusting our own responses to things?

The Pattern I'm Noticing

Something's shifting in how we engage with the world, and I'm seeing it with increasing regularity across all aspects of life.

We've become a culture of verification. Before we let ourselves experience something, we need to confirm its origins. Before we respond to an idea, we investigate its source. Before we trust what resonates with us, we check it against external measures of what should resonate.

This approach doesn't invite connection. It invites investigation.

This approach doesn't invite connection. It invites investigation.

I see it in meetings where someone shares an idea and the room immediately starts building the case for why it won't work. In conversations where we're scanning for inconsistencies instead of listening to what's being said. In how we approach new information - not with curiosity about whether it might be true, but with suspicion about whether we can trust its source.

I'm not saying there aren't bad actors out there. People using AI and every other tool available to deceive and manipulate. That's reality, and we need some level of discernment.

But there's also a lot of good out there. A lot that's real and meaningful and true.

And we're losing the ability to recognize it because we've outsourced that recognition. We've handed our authority to determine what's meaningful over to verification systems - articles, algorithms, expert opinions, detection tools - run by people who are just as uncertain as we are.

We've stopped asking "What is my experience of this?" and started asking "What should my experience of this be?"

What We're Actually Losing

Here's the cost, and I don't think we're fully accounting for it:

When we filter every experience through verification before we allow ourselves to engage with it, we lose our capacity to be changed by anything. To learn something that surprises us. To be moved by something we didn't expect.

But it's more than that. When mistrust becomes the filter through which every experience passes, something essential disappears. Not just from our relationship with content or ideas, but from our relationships with each other.

We're not just missing good things. We're fundamentally disconnected from direct experience itself.

There's a difference between being present with something and investigating it. When we're investigating, we're hovering above our experience, cataloging evidence. When we're present, we notice details we would have missed. We respond to what's actually being offered rather than to our preemptive story about what might be wrong with it. We can be surprised, moved, changed by what we encounter.

Why can't we enjoy music without first confirming how it was made? Why can't we read something that resonates without investigating the author's credentials? Why can't we sit with an idea that sparks new thinking without checking whether it came from an approved source? Why can't we just interact with people without questioning their motives?

What Becomes Possible

There's a difference between appropriate discernment and approaching every moment as potential evidence. We're good at critical thinking - most of us have built our lives on that capacity. But that skill works best as something we use, not as a barrier between us and direct experience.

The messages telling us what's real and what's not will keep coming. Each claiming certainty. Each saying "don't trust them, trust me." The gotcha culture will keep building. The suspicion will intensify.

But we get to choose how we move through this.

What if our response to something is actually valid? What if when something resonates with us, moves us, teaches us - that matters, not because we've verified it against external standards, but because resonance itself tells us something true?

Think about what shifts when you're actually present - with someone, with music, with an idea. When you listen because you're curious, not because you're testing. When you respond to what's actually there rather than to some predetermined script. When something moves you and you let yourself be moved instead of immediately investigating whether you should be.

That's what becomes available when we trust ourselves enough to engage directly with what's here. Not naive trust that ignores real concerns, but trust in our own capacity to discern what's meaningful, what's real, what serves us.

Will we investigate or be curious? Will we live in doubt or in joy?

Every interaction - with people, with ideas, with moments that could bring joy - offers this choice: Will we investigate or be curious? Will we live as forensic analysts looking for evidence of wrongness, or as present humans who can experience what's actually here? Will we live in doubt or in joy?

There's a lot of good in the world. A lot that's real. A lot worth experiencing directly.

I'd hate for us to miss it because we were too busy verifying whether we had permission to notice it..

Where in your life are you waiting for permission to trust what moves you?

What would change if you gave yourself that permission?