On trust

I choose to trust.

Trust is a choice – and a powerful one. In a world where suspicion and doubt seem to be default settings, I choose to trust. Not because it’s always easy, but because mistrust is costly—in time, energy, and peace of mind.

Choosing to trust doesn’t mean I’m naive, unaware, or guillible. I value evidence and reason just as much as anyone. My trust is not blind; it’s deliberate.

Trust doesn’t mean ignoring evidence to the contrary. That would be contrary to reason, a very basic case of confirmation bias – seeing only what you want to see.

Confirmation bias is a very dangerous aspect when it comes to trust. But more so when it comes to mistrust. Because it can start a damaging positive-feedback loop.

So how do you balance trust with the reality of conflicting evidence? Or mistrust with the reality of missing evidence?

Trust is deeply personal. When trust in a partner is broken, it doesn’t just affect the present—it calls into question your past experiences and even your own judgment. Suddenly, memories you cherished feel tainted, and you start to doubt not just others, but yourself.

There are events in your memory that are associated with feelings and reality. Then you realize that some of those feelings were similar to the ones you had when trust was broken, before knowing it was broken. So you start doubting everything.

And it goes so deep that it can impact your identity. At the end, your experiences, thoughts, feelings, and actions shape who you are. When some of them get retroactively changed, because of doubt, your identity loses some balance.

Was it intuition? For the longest time I was a person that would discredit intuition as it’s generally not something provable. “I just feel it” is not a good argument to back-up choices. Let alone life-altering choices.

But after reading (Book about Fear), I started to give some respect to that gut-feeling that is usually associated with intuition.

So back to it: was it intuition? was it intuition I should’ve paid more attention to? Now all my memories are damaged. And my ability to trust is hurt.

I don’t want my trust to be broken. And more specially I don’t want broken trust to become baggage I carry into new relationships and interactions.

But it’s a deeply defeating feeling to get your trust broken by someone who you specifically wanted to protect from “mistrust baggage”.

I want to go back to the sentence I opened with:

Mistrust is expensive. Trust, independently of if it’s easy or not, allows you to not dedicate resources to confirm that the things that you’re trusting to happen, are hapenning.

When you don’t trust that something will be done (or won’t be done if that’s the expectation), you need to monitor the progress of it.

And that becomes easy when you monitor or vigilate that someone is doing something. Because you can easily tell when it’s not: you just don’t see it being happening. It’s easy to demonstrate. It’s easy to verify. It’s easy to disproof.

But when you monitor that someone is not doing something, that’s more difficult.

Because the nature of provability, it’s harder to proof that something does not exist. So I, as the monitored person, have a more difficult to proove that I’m effectively not doing something, as expected.

And by that very nature, if I’m someone who does not want to assist in proving that something is not happening, it’s easy for me to do that thing I’m not supposed to be doing, as my cooperation in disproving it can be compromised by my intentions.

The real cost of mistrust is the constant need for proof and monitoring. It’s relatively easy to prove that someone is doing something—they leave evidence. But it’s much harder to prove that someone is not doing something. This creates a situation where mistrust requires constant vigilance, and even then, certainty is elusive.

Take a simple example: if someone is stealing small amounts of money from their flatmates, proving it is difficult without their cooperation. The person can always deny it, offer excuses, or simply refuse to engage. The burden of proof falls on the accusers, and the mistrust grows, feeding a cycle of suspicion and defensiveness.

That’s why Trust is cheap. But also why it’s hard to achieve. Particularly when betray is common either for you, from the person you’re trusting, or at the environment you’re at.

The feeling of having to monitor is gut wrenching. It breeds anxiety and paranoia. It starts a feedback loop in which even not finding evidence that you’re being betrayed, feed the idea that they’re just better at hiding it than you are at searching. That they just know better than you how to prevent leaving traces. So you obsess, and you dig deeper, and you still find nothing, but it doesn’t help.

You cannot get helped. The more you don’t find, the more paranoid you get.

At some point, the only way to break the cycle is to return to trust. But returning to trust is not as cheap and easy as giving trust by default.

Those are the primary reasons I choose trust—not only it’s easier, but it’s necessary for my own well-being. But also, why I can’t let myself be found in an environment in which my trust is already damaged. I have to check on myself to stop any paranoic and anxious thoughts fed by mistrust. If I don’t, mistrust becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, leading only to self-doubt, self-damage, and self-destruction.