The biggest issue I've been seeing as an intellectual myself (in my case, as an autistic young man who doesn't accept mainstream answers for anything, simplistic answers, and believes Ockham's Razor is weaponized).

Most of it has been destroyed in the past couple of years because of a religious plantation of sorts I was in for a long time (my producer, Neigsendoig, was in similar slavery for 22 years, and he's 23). However, another part of my shell breaking is what I'm listening to, which is this audiobook (yes, it's an Invidious link) by Ash G (his pseudonym, I'd imagine). Myself and Neigsendoig are going through quite a journey right now, making it to where we might end up being shunned by those who don't understand, just because we can't really dumb things down. Our autism doesn't really help with it either, though I will point out that we have special interests that include local-first computing and numerology.

That, and we're getting information from a ton of different sources, as the link I provided was just one of them. The Survival Podcast by Jack Spirko is another recommendation I would make (it's also on YouTube, but both Neigsendoig and I would recommend viewing it either with a podcast player or an Invidious instance), as another example. David Nikao Wilcoxson is also one we'd recommend on the religious side of things (I've been kicked from a Mastodon instance for that alone).

All of this is overwhelming to me, but I'm attempting to keep it to a minimum and do what I need to do (same with Neigsendoig). It's hard, though won't be worth it if I don't suffer and become refined like gold (at least, in theory).