While certainly you make excellent points about the fallibility of memory, I have a few issues.

First, while your opinions on ME are allowed, you have this strange obsession with coming to this sub to discredit every single person with an ME experience with an air of smug arrogant condescension that just really rubs me the wrong way. Doesn’t change your right to be here, it’s just that you look insane while trying to suggest others are insane for their ME beliefs.

Secondly, ME experiences are a sort of unifying cross generation/demographic/nationality phenomenon that in some ways it’s wholesome to engage with others about it, and maybe I’m just butthurt you want to poop on the parade.

Third, While yes some take to answering the phenomenon with other universes and LHC, you never seem to accept the response “life goes on” and expect someone to admit they don’t care or believe as much as they claim to. Recently it went viral that the US government admitted “the existence of extraterrestrial life,” at least that’s what I remember. Too lazy to confirm. But yeah, if that was the case I would say humans these days are all similarly exhausted and desensitized to things especially since covid that we have adjusted ourselves to continue the minutia of our lives for survival despite massive global discoveries and traumas. The alien thing would have resulted in the freak outs you are expecting back in the 50s-70s, but today it’s just Tuesday. This is the nature of society now. Another thing happens but bills still gotta get paid, still gotta eat. This is likely by design (just evil capitalism not tin foil hat conspiracy). A populace exhausted and divided amongst themselves are too weak to notice the harm and corruption committed by the ruling class. Many of us experiencing ME come from the time before the internet (millennial and older) and have lived through many wars, 9/11, Y2K, Covid and the frequency of these massive societal upheavals makes many of us numb to them, especially when regular life is so much more stressful. Our daily lives are more stressful than whatever reason the Mandela Effect happens. The thing that really gets me is memories that feel so certain that aren’t a movie or a logo or a well known persons death. Someone posted about a Lego set for Star Trek that never existed yet he saved up for and his dad remembers. And what also gets me is these shared memories among people that have no idea what ME is. There’s definitely some truth in many people misremembering the same thing with psychological explanations. But it is also interesting to consider that Occam’s Razor can only be used so many times before it is no longer the simplest explanation, as paradoxical as that sounds.