Totems and Earth Wires: How to tell real life from the internet's version of it

Twitter, Reddit, Facebook - choose your poison. Each is a window into an epidemic of untouched grass.
Every day people fill their minds with opinions, assumptions, and hypothetical situations that are completely divorced from the outside world.
You’re locked in a mini-metaverse, constrained by the ideas you consume.
This applies to culture wars, salary conversations, dating, and any other 'topic of the day'.
There are a lot of opinions that are 100% real, but only on Twitter.
As soon as you speak to someone who isn’t hyper-online (aka touching grass) you realise how fringe these ideas are.
How to stay grounded
Remember the movie Inception, where Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his team construct dream worlds so detailed that they start losing grip on what's real?
To avoid getting trapped, they use special "totems" like Cobb's spinning top to check whether they're still dreaming or safely back to reality.
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We can think of our time in personalised social media realms like entering an immersive dream state - bizarre worlds that can at times be indistinguishable from reality, but with a few wicked twists.
When we spend too long immersed in these digital dream worlds, we start losing track of which opinions are purely digital, and which reflect real-world views. The lines become blurred.
Just like Cobb's totem, we need "reality checks" to ground us in everyday perspectives outside our specific online world.
I think everyone would do well to have at least one friend who isn’t on their favourite social media platform. And every time you find yourself getting worked up by an opinion that seems pervasive, ask them about it in order to ‘ground’ yourself.
In doing so you can test whether this is actually an opinion regular people hold, or if it’s a phenomenon unique to people who frequent the same online watering holes as you.
Some parliamentary government systems have what's called a "shadow cabinet." This refers to senior members of the opposition party taking on ceremonial posts that mirror actual cabinet roles.
For example, you'll have a minister for education who is part of the ruling party, and then a shadow minister for education from the opposing party.
Shadow ministers have no official power, but they follow and critique government policies as an ideological counterweight.
We can create our own "shadow cabinets" by proactively seeking out those with opposing viewpoints to challenge our assumptions.
For every opinion you hold strongly, build a shadow cabinet of people who hold the opposite idea. Have regular conversations to test how different your opinions really are.