Interacting with traders would have broken you of that illusion too. Professional traders are much more prone to group think than they’ll ever admit to, which occasionally causes the market to do sub-optimal things.
If you just go with the trend most of the time, you take part in a self-amplifying hype cycle that pushes all participants' equities higher. Whereas if you try to "outsmart" the group, you will fail most of the time, even if you might be right in your skepticism, because stock prices aren't strictly based on actual objective reality, but more on the perception of reality by most market participants.