>I still have low confidence in almost everything I'm told, and doing proper investigations into all of it is excessively time consuming, terrible for my mental health, and frequently impossible/difficult without institutional affiliation for things like being able to read primary academic sources that are being reported on.

>How is the average person supposed to navigate this? There's literally no way.

By embracing the fact that we live in a state of information uncertainty and you can't know everything.

People need to put in hard work to develop their worldview based on analyzing primary source material.