I decided to join my family on a small island called Lanzarote in February 2037. Here, we can still enjoy relatively clean, crisp air and fresh food. For everything else, we have a powerful internet connection, the salty ocean, and padel courts. The youngest kids are at university, and my wife and I finally decided to leave the big towns where we had lived for the last thirty-odd years. A dream came true, since I am still relatively young and fit.

In the early hours of the morning, I opened my favourite social media platform, "Socratica", and suddenly discovered that a massive tsunami wave, generated by a gigantic earthquake, had nearly submerged the city of Brighton. At the moment, the balance sheet seems catastrophic. Casualties are estimated between 57,000 and possibly up to 103,000. A hecatomb. The media is flooded with disastrous images, and thousands of people are uploading pictures and videos of the disaster. Millions are asking questions about friends and family members who were living in Brighton at the time and have disappeared. The images are nearly impossible to watch. The destruction is unthinkable.

Then I started seeing, here and there, posts from people in Brighton calling the whole situation a hoax. They describe the town as quiet and sunny, as usual. But the volume of images coming from Brighton seems to describe a totally different story: the city is completely destroyed and underwater. Corpses floating in brown water all over. For every ten tweets, posts, or videos showing the city on its knees, there is one saying the city is completely fine.

Because it is a four-hour flight and I do not have friends living there, I have no way to verify it in person. So I decided to call one of the numbers the city council provided for people who wanted more precise information about survivors. I called, and a sweet young woman called Sarah confirmed the scale of the disaster. Unfortunately, it really happened.

Thank Santa Claus I do not have family or friends living there, but I feel extremely sorry for the hundreds of thousands of people who used to live there. Still, I am not totally convinced, because more and more people online are loudly insisting that the whole thing is a gigantic hoax. I do not know what to think. I am dazed and confused, because I do not have the possibility to check it personally.

I start thinking about how "Socratica" claims to have over 12 billion verified users and active contributors, while the world population has just passed 9 billion at the end of 2036. Not everyone in the world can be on this social media. Barely any kids under the age of 14 are on it. And most of the users are in Western societies; rarely do you see users from the Far East or people living in Africa in there. Plus, the Western world right now is packed with very old people, unable to move from a bed, kept alive by machines. My basic guess is the number of real users must be much less, probably a fraction. But how can I verify it besides my own thoughts and suppositions?

But the thousands of images and videos are there. I saw them. The desperate messages from families asking for any news of missing relatives, screaming for help, were there. And I spoke to Sarah for over ten minutes. Her broken voice, her inability to give me any clear numbers yet, her uncertainty. All of this cannot be a hoax. But what if Sarah was just an AI bot? And what if the council setting up an emergency line was not the council, but another bot?

But what can I do? How can I verify it?

With a sense of utter desperation, I put my phone down and go for a swim in the ocean to refresh my brain. The awareness of being unable to verify even a simple objective fact is blowing my mind. I will keep swimming in the ocean, eating fresh food and vegetables, and treating as "objective reality" only what surrounds me, and nothing else.

I then started reflecting on our society: newspapers, then radio, then TV, and then the internet connected us like never before, and now that we are hyperconnected we are completely disconnected. What has just happened? It is all lost. No information can be verified with certainty. I feel like a hunter-gatherer with no external contact with anyone besides the members of his own tribe. We are completely isolated from the rest of the world and hyperconnected at the same time. I am grateful that I live in a beautiful place surrounded by members of my tribe and we love and support each other, but I cannot lie, the emptiness of this new world is killing my brain.

The death of objective reality is coming sooner than you think.