Sunday Sharies 03.27.22

A QUOTE

"Fear leads to more fear, and trust leads to more trust."

— Dean Ornish, American physician and researcher

A QUESTION

What moves markets more: fear or trust?


A THOUGHT

A cynical worldview is the attitude du jour. We romanticize the past and fall into the golden age fallacy that things used to be better.

As I sat at a red light the other day, I thought about how infrequently people commend the parts of life that just fit together in the background- like functioning traffic lights, or public park maintenance, or SWIFT. When we don't care to understand an operation, we leave it up to others and forget to appreciate its criticality.

Instead, we spend energy chastising things that violate our impression of control - like companies sharing our personal shopping history or social media manipulating our attention. Of course it's justified to be concerned about data privacy and to feel dubious about algorithms designed to keep us scrolling. But if you widen your aperture and consider life outside the screen, the guarantors of our trusting nature lurk beneath infinite social and market transactions:

We trust oncoming drivers to stop when a red light shines in their direction.

We believe the 'sell by' date on the milk carton will keep us from getting sick.

We assume the builders who made the roof we're sitting under were competent at their job.

We let thousands of strangers take care of us every day.