DISTRUST
I think I have been writing about far too many beautiful things lately.
Courage, humility, authenticity, personal sovereignty...
Uff.
Very inspiring.
So I suppose it is time to talk about something slightly less beautiful. Something I have become rather familiar with over the years, although I am not particularly proud of it.
Distrust.
You know that wonderful moment during a job interview when someone asks you to describe your three greatest strengths and your three greatest weaknesses?
Ah, yes.
Especially when you are young and slightly full of yourself, the first part is wonderful. You have probably prepared your answer already.
I'm hardworking, independent, creative...
Perhaps even a natural leader if you are feeling particularly confident that morning.
Excellent.
What an extraordinary human being.
But then comes the second question:
And what would you say are your three greatest weaknesses?
Well...
Suddenly things become a little more complicated.
Because, of course, you have weaknesses. We all do. But apparently the objective during a job interview is to describe them in such a sophisticated way that, somehow, by the end of the sentence they have magically transformed themselves into strengths.
And then come my favourite answers:
I'm a perfectionist.
I'm addicted to work.
Sometimes I care too much.
Oh, please.
Don't get me wrong. Perhaps you really are a perfectionist. But perfectionist according to whom?
Because sometimes what we call perfectionism is simply our inability to accept that somebody else might do something differently from us and still do it perfectly well.
And being addicted to work?
Well, perhaps you genuinely love your job. Or perhaps, like most human beings, you have developed the rather inconvenient habit of needing money to survive.
Understandable.
But sometimes there is another reason, one that is considerably less attractive to mention during a job interview. Perhaps you simply don't want to go home. Perhaps you don't particularly enjoy spending time with your partner, your children or your family. Or perhaps you have discovered that working twelve hours a day is an excellent way of avoiding spending twelve minutes alone with your own thoughts.
I know.
That sounds rather unpleasant.
But believe me, I have seen it more often than I would like.
Please, Make Me Go Back to the Office
Actually, I remember a rather funny situation.
During Covid, I was working for a company where, like almost everywhere else, we suddenly had to work from home. And something rather interesting happened: people discovered that they could be productive without physically sitting in an office.
Some were even more productive.
Imagine that.
When the restrictions ended, the company started discussing whether employees should continue working remotely a few days a week. Personally, I thought it made sense. Less commuting, more flexibility, better quality of life... quite reasonable.
But one of my superiors strongly disagreed.
There were discussions about productivity, teamwork, company culture and all those wonderful concepts companies enjoy discussing for hours, until at some point this man said something I will probably never forget.
Basically:
No, please. I would rather coming back to the office were mandatory. I don't want to spend that much time at home with my family. What a nightmare.
I couldn't stop laughing.
But actually, I respected him for it.
Seriously.
Because how many people would admit that?
Most people would probably prepare fifteen PowerPoint slides about the importance of face-to-face collaboration.
He just didn't want to be at home.
Fair enough.
At least it was honest.
And this little story brings me to something I have observed repeatedly throughout my life. Human beings are extraordinarily good at presenting one reason for doing something while the real reason remains somewhere else.
Sometimes we do it deliberately. Sometimes because we are ashamed. Sometimes because the truth would make us look selfish, cowardly or simply less admirable than we would like.
And sometimes — which is much more interesting — because we genuinely believe the explanation we have invented for ourselves.
Think about it.
How many times have you heard someone say they are doing something for their children?
Or for their partner?
Or for their family?
How noble.
And perhaps they really are.
But perhaps underneath that beautiful explanation there is also fear. Comfort. Money. Ego. The need to be admired. Or simply the inability to make an uncomfortable decision.
And please, don't misunderstand me. I am not suggesting that every good action hides a selfish intention.
That would be ridiculous.
What interests me is that sometimes we don't know.
Not even about ourselves.
Someone can take fear and call it responsibility. Take jealousy and call it concern. Take control and call it love. Take avoidance and call it work ethic.
And sometimes we do the opposite too.
We take courage and call it stupidity.
We take intuition and call it irrationality.
Depending, perhaps, on which explanation allows us to continue living comfortably with ourselves.
That is where my distrust begins.
Not because I think everybody is lying.
Actually, a liar is almost easier. At least the liar knows the truth.
The complicated human being is the one who genuinely believes their own explanation.
And all of us are capable of being that person.
Including me, obviously.
I am a human being too, unfortunately.
Anyway...
“I Would Never Do That”
There is another sentence that has always fascinated me:
“I would never do something like that.”
Really?
Never?
Under what circumstances?
Because that is where things become considerably more interesting.
Imagine the kindest person you know. Someone genuinely compassionate, peaceful, perhaps someone you simply cannot imagine intentionally hurting another human being.
Now imagine somebody seriously hurts their child.
Their mother.
Their partner.
Whoever they love most.
What happens then?
Would they forgive? Would they want justice? Would they want punishment? Would they want revenge?
And how certain are you that you know the answer?
I have always thought that even the best person in the world might be capable of committing the worst act if they became convinced that the reason was good enough.
And no, I don't mean that everybody is secretly evil.
I mean that values are very easy to have when nobody is testing them.
It is easy to be generous when generosity costs you nothing. Easy to be loyal when loyalty requires no sacrifice. Easy to forgive when nobody has truly hurt you. Easy to say money doesn't matter when you have enough.
And it is relatively easy to be peaceful when nobody has given you a sufficiently good reason not to be.
Then life changes the conditions.
And suddenly we discover things.
Sometimes about other people.
Sometimes, unfortunately, about ourselves.
That is why whenever someone tells me:
I would never do that.
I usually think:
I hope you're right.
Because personally, I prefer:
I hope I would never do that.
It seems considerably more honest.
I know myself under the circumstances I have experienced so far.
I don't know myself under every possible circumstance.
And neither do you.
Uff.
Slightly uncomfortable.
Let's continue.
Twenty Years
I want to tell you about someone I know, with his permission, of course.
This man was married to the same woman for around twenty years. They had children and eventually separated and divorced. I am not going to tell you the entire story because it is long, complicated and, honestly, quite sad.
He was a businessman. For many years things went very well financially, and after the divorce he paid financial support for his daughters. Because he had money and wanted them to live comfortably, he voluntarily contributed considerably more than he was legally required to.
He had it.
He wanted to give it.
Simple.
Then his financial situation collapsed.
And I mean collapsed.
There came a point when he could barely support himself.
His former wife knew what was happening, but by then there was resentment between them. There was pain, history, anger and probably a thousand other things that neither you nor I could completely understand because we weren't inside that marriage.
Thankfully.
Legal proceedings followed. She continued pursuing the payments, he had to demonstrate that he genuinely could no longer afford them and, at some point, even prison became part of the legal threats surrounding the situation.
There was very little compassion left.
And before somebody gets excited, no, this is not about women.
Please.
I have met enough cowardly, selfish and ridiculous men in my life to write several additional blogs.
Gender does not have a monopoly on resentment.
What stayed with me was something completely different.
Twenty years.
Imagine knowing another human being for twenty years.
You sleep beside them. You have children together. You see them sick, happy, exhausted, successful, frightened and ridiculous. You know their family, their habits, their fears and probably exactly what expression they make when they are annoyed before they even open their mouth.
Surely after twenty years you know someone.
Right?
Well...
Perhaps you know them under the circumstances that occurred during those twenty years.
And that isn't necessarily the same thing.
Maybe you have never seen them lose everything. Maybe you have never seen them deeply resentful. Maybe you have never seen them with enormous power over you, or completely powerless themselves. Maybe they have never had to choose between their values and something they desperately wanted.
Perhaps life simply hasn't created those conditions yet.
And then one day it does.
And suddenly there is a version of that person you have never met.
The strange thing is that perhaps they weren't hiding that person from you.
Perhaps they had never met that version of themselves either.
Have You Observed Enough?
And, unfortunately for you, this is where my brain inevitably starts thinking about physics.
You knew it was coming.
There is something in quantum mechanics called quantum state tomography.
Very roughly, imagine I give you a quantum system prepared in an unknown state and ask you to determine what that state is.
You cannot simply perform one measurement on one individual system, look at the result and announce:
Excellent. I understand everything.
Unfortunately, nature requires slightly more effort than that.
To reconstruct an unknown quantum state, we perform different measurements across many identically prepared copies of the system and use the statistics of those results to infer the state.
One measurement gives us information.
But it doesn't give us the whole state.
And when I thought about this in relation to human beings, I found it strangely beautiful.
Because perhaps this is exactly what we do wrong with people.
We observe someone under certain conditions and decide that we know them.
You have seen someone with money.
Have you seen them without it?
You have seen them in love.
Have you seen them rejected?
You have seen them powerless.
Have you seen them with power?
You have seen them being admired.
Have you seen them humiliated?
You have seen them when loyalty was easy.
Have you seen them when loyalty costs them something they desperately want?
Different conditions.
Different observations.
Different information.
Of course, there is a small problem with my analogy.
Human beings are considerably more annoying than quantum systems.
We don't have hundreds of identically prepared copies of ourselves available for experimentation.
Thank God.
One of me is already enough.
And unlike those systems, humans change while you observe them. We learn, suffer, adapt, lie, heal, remember, forget, become kinder, become more bitter and occasionally manage several of those things simultaneously.
So perhaps there is no final tomography of another human being.
No magical moment when you can finally say:
Done. I know you.
And strangely, I don't find that sad.
I find it honest.
I Don't Distrust You
Because when I say that I distrust people, perhaps distrust isn't even exactly the right word.
It isn't that I distrust.
It is that I don't trust completely.
There is a difference.
I leave a little space.
For doubt.
You can be my friend for twenty years and I will leave it there. I can love you and leave it there. I can admire you enormously, believe you are one of the kindest people I have ever met and still leave it there.
Not because I am waiting for you to betray me.
That sounds exhausting.
But because I know there are versions of you I haven't observed yet.
And there are versions of me you haven't observed either.
Perhaps under terrible circumstances you would disappoint me.
Or perhaps under exactly those circumstances you would surprise me with an amount of courage, loyalty or kindness I never imagined you possessed.
That is important too.
Uncertainty works both ways.
We tend to imagine that the unknown version of somebody must necessarily be worse.
Why?
Maybe the person you think is weak becomes extraordinary when everything collapses. Maybe someone selfish gives everything away when it really matters. Maybe someone you never expected to protect you becomes the only person who stays.
We don't know.
That's the point.
And perhaps this is why I have become increasingly uncomfortable with people dividing the world too quickly into good and bad humans.
Good according to what?
Bad under which conditions?
Observed for how long?
Someone can love you and still hurt you. Someone can betray you and still have genuinely loved you. Someone can behave terribly at twenty-five and become an extraordinary person at forty.
And someone can spend forty years behaving beautifully and then do something nobody around them imagined they were capable of.
Annoying, isn't it?
It would be considerably easier if humans came with fixed parameters.
Unfortunately, apparently nobody consulted me when designing the system.
The Space I Leave for Doubt
So I leave uncertainty.
Not paranoia.
Not suspicion.
Uncertainty.
There is a difference.
Perhaps trust isn't the elimination of uncertainty after all.
Maybe that is where we get it wrong.
Perhaps trust is looking at another human being, knowing perfectly well that you will never possess all the data, and still deciding:
Okay.
I will trust you anyway.
Not blindly.
Not completely.
But enough.
Very romantic, I know.
And perhaps there is even something slightly arrogant hidden inside the sentence:
I know you.
Do you?
Completely?
I am not even entirely sure I know myself, and unfortunately I have been trapped inside this particular system since birth.
So yes, I can trust you. I can love you, help you, forgive you, walk beside you for years and believe deeply in your goodness.
But somewhere inside all of that, I will always leave a little space for something I haven't observed yet.
And I hope you leave the same space for me.
Not because we expect the worst from each other, but because neither of us has crossed every river yet. We haven't climbed every mountain. We haven't lost everything we could lose. We haven't had to forgive everything we might one day need to forgive. We haven't been tempted by everything that could tempt us.
And honestly?
Hopefully we never are.
I have enough experiments already.
Maybe this is what distrust means to me after all.
Not believing that people are bad.
Not expecting betrayal.
Simply accepting that another human being will always contain some amount of uncertainty.
And perhaps the benefit of the doubt is not something we give people because we trust them completely.
Perhaps we give it because we are humble enough to understand that one observation is not the whole state.
That there are still conditions we haven't seen.
Questions we haven't asked.
Versions of each other we haven't met.
And perhaps that is perfectly fine.
Because when it comes to another human being, no matter how many years we have spent observing them, there will probably always be something left to discover.
We haven't observed everything yet.