The other day, I received an SMS text message. This in itself was fairly unusual, as the only texts I tend to get these days are automated confirmations of deliveries and suchlike, but there was another layer of unusual to it.

“Hi mum,” the text said. “My phone’s not working, so please contact me on WhatsApp at [number] xxx”.

Initially, I thought this might be an honest-to-goodness wrong number, which is a phenomenon that used to be widespread, but today, where we tend to do everything via pre-populated contact lists, doesn’t tend to happen much. Something about it made me feel a bit suspicious, though, so I decided to Google the text of the message.

Sure enough, it was a scam. I was both disappointed and unsurprised to discover this, but it got me thinking: I used to be someone who really, honestly wanted to believe the best about my fellow man, but these days, it feels nigh-impossible to trust almost anything you see.

That “wrong number” is actually a scammer trying to get you to send them money, or to steal your personal information. That heartwarming post you saw on social media is actually a viral marketing campaign. That “look at me I’m so empowered” sex worker doing hot tub streams on Twitch is actually being forced into exploitation by darker forces working behind the scenes rather than because she wants to.

It’s exhausting to think that, more often than not, these days what you see is most definitely not what you get. The world feels like a darker place that is full of mistrust, and aside from the necessity for constant vigilance being very tiring, it also makes it difficult for those of us who do want to go about our business in a genuinely honest sort of way.

You see it everywhere. Creative types being forced to churn out “content” with clickbait titles just to get eyes on their work. Workplaces and brands jumping on silly trends like TikTok for no discernible reason other than “it’s popular, so we should be seen to be doing it”. The growth in various forms of AI-generated text, images and sounds making misinformation and lies easier to spread than ever before.

On top of all that, the services we’ve come to increasingly rely on over the years actively make themselves worse over time, and we just sit back and take it. For example, it used to be that I could click “Publish” on this post and it would automatically share it to my friends on Facebook and Twitter, but that’s not possible any more because of supposed “improvements” that both of those services have made.

This happens outside the online sphere, too. My last car I bought was worse than my previous one in terms of the features it had, but cost more. This despite me telling the car salesman to their face that I wanted to spend “about the same” on the new vehicle and have the same features.

And no-one seems particularly bothered by all this. I mean, sure, people comment on it occasionally, but no-one actually does anything about it. They keep posting their wacky MidJourney images, increasingly believing that “they” created the image through stringing words together. Scam text messages are a way of life, with people just shrugging at them rather than attempting to report them.

And those supposed to be “in charge” don’t do anything anyway, so why bother? There’s a house down the road from us whose front garden is constantly filled with obviously stolen motorcycles, which local kids can frequently be seen riding around making a nuisance of themselves on, without wearing any sort of safety gear or having any concern for the people around them.

It increasingly feels like we are a people blighted by absolute apathy and laziness, and despite countless warnings from dystopian popular media and the arts over the years, no-one really cares. So long as you have your content to consume and your vacuous “approval” of your fake life on social media from other fake people living fake existences, nothing seems to matter to anyone.

I’m really fed up of it. And it doesn’t feel like there’s a way to escape from it all. Because this isn’t just “an Internet thing” any more. It’s a “this is the world we live in now” thing.