Has anyone else just... given up trying to convince people cryptids are real?

Genuine question. I've spent years collecting evidence, going on investigations, reading the literature, and I've basically just stopped trying to convince anyone that any of this is real. It's exhausting and it never works.

Like, I've shown people genuinely interesting evidence and they'll just find some way to explain it away. Blurry photo? Must be a dog. Consistent eyewitness testimony? People are unreliable. Physical trace evidence? Contamination or misidentification. There's no amount of evidence that actually shifts the dial for most people.

Meanwhile if I started saying I believed in literally any mainstream belief system no one would bat an eye. But suggest that unknown large animals might be living in British forests and suddenly I'm a conspiracy theorist.

So yeah, I've kind of just made peace with the fact that this is a hobby I do for myself, not something I'm going to convince the wider world about.

I think the issue is that we're asking people to accept evidence for something that challenges their worldview. It's not really about the quality of evidence - it's about cognitive dissonance. Most people want to live in a world where we know what's in our forests and we've categorised all the animals.

The ones of us who are into cryptozoology are basically fine with the world being stranger and less knowable than mainstream science suggests. That's actually a pretty different worldview.

Mate, you've just described the entire fringe research experience. Nobody cares until it's on Netflix, and then they care for five minutes before moving on to the next thing. Best approach is to just enjoy it for what it is - a fascinating hobby with other interesting people - rather than trying to convince the mainstream.

This is actually healthy though. The moment you stop trying to prove something to everyone else is when you can actually enjoy researching it. Some of the best cryptozoologists I know are completely unbothered by what mainstream people think. They investigate because they're curious, not because they want validation.

There's no amount of evidence that actually shifts the dial for most people.

You've hit on the real problem. It's not about evidence quantity or quality - it's about burden of proof. Mainstream science sets the bar so high for cryptids that it's basically impossible to meet. Meanwhile anecdotal evidence for mainstream accepted animals is completely accepted.

That's not your problem though. That's a problem with how science communication works.

The way I've made peace with it is by focusing on the actual mysteries rather than proving them to other people. Like, why ARE there consistent reports of large cats in the UK? That's a genuinely interesting question even if we never prove what the animals are. The investigation itself is the point.