There was a moment, and it’s a moment I think about a lot. I was parked in a parking garage. The engine was off, and I was holding my phone, trying to figure out if the person I’d been talking to for three weeks was real.
Not real, as in, not existentially or ontologically real. Not real as in, was this person a person, and was this nonprofit a nonprofit, or was it simply a story concocted by someone to get something out of me?
I sat there a while. The parking garage was dimly lit and smelled like exhaust and old concrete. And what I was feeling was not what I expected. It was not anger. It was not even suspicion. It was grief. Grief at the realization that this was the world now. The world where the default question was no longer “Who is this person?” but “Is this person?”
I eventually looked up their website. It looked professional. Clean. Trustworthy. But by this point, I’d learned that a clean website was really no indication of anything. I performed a Whois domain lookup on their domain name. The domain was registered eleven days ago. The organization was supposed to have been operating for six years.
That was the end of this conversation.
What We Were Taught About Trust
I was raised on the idea that trust was something that took time to build, that you observed how people were when the world got hard, that you looked at whether they showed up, that you looked at the gap between their words and their actions, that trust was something that was built, and that the only thing that couldn’t be faked was time.
The internet didn’t do away with any of that advice, it just made it easier to work around, to present the illusion of time, of credibility, of substance.
It is possible to present the appearance of years of existence on the internet, to fill out a LinkedIn profile in the course of an afternoon, to have a voice on the other end of the Zoom call that feels warm, familiar, even intimate, and be performing every word of it.
This is not a cynical statement; it is a sad one. For I am not, by nature, a suspicious person. I am a man who gives people the benefit of the doubt, often to a fault. I am a man who believes in generosity of interpretation. I am a man who believes that most people are doing the best they can. And I still believe all of that. But I have learned—slowly, often expensively—that belief and verification are not mutually exclusive.
Checking Is Not the Same as Doubting
What I’ve come to understand is that checking things out is not the same as distrust. It’s care. Care for yourself. And, if you think about it long enough, care for the other person too. Because if it’s real and good and worth your time, it’s going to hold up to a second look. And the things that can’t hold up to a second look were never what we thought they were to begin with.
There’s a kind of masculinity that was presented to me as a kid. A kind where confidence meant you never doubted anything. Real men didn’t second guess. They chose and they moved. Hesitation was weakness. Asking questions was weakness.
I spent a lot of time trying to be this kind of man. And it made me easy to fool.
The harder, quieter, more genuinely confident thing—I’m still learning this—is to slow down. To ask. To look behind the surface before I commit my energy, my resources, my trust to something. That’s not fear. That’s maturity.
The People Worth Trusting Invite the Question
The person in that parking garage story is me, sitting in the dark, finally asking the right questions, that person had spent years confusing openness with recklessness. Thinking that being trusting meant taking things at face value. Thinking that to question meant to be unkind.
But what that dim concrete of that parking garage taught me was that the most important relationships in my life have always been open to question. My closest friendships, my best professional relationships, they have never been threatened by a question. In fact, the people who are worth trusting are the ones who will encourage you to take a closer look. They don’t need you to avert your gaze.
The internet is not becoming more honest. In fact, the tools available to build honest fictions are becoming more sophisticated every year. Deepfakes, AI-generated media, and audio synthesis are making the surface look more and more honest. Which means the ability to think critically, by asking what’s really here, becomes more important, not less.
I remain, at my core, an optimist. I believe the world is full of people and places and things worth trusting. But I have come to terms with the fact that trust starts with looking.
The man I’m becoming is a man who looks. Not out of fear. Out of knowledge. Knowledge of what is real. What is real does not hide.
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This post brought to you by Safdar Ali. On Linkedin here.Â
Photo: iStock
