Fidelity. You cannot purchase it. It can only be earned.
Trust is another one of them; you can’t buy trust. You can only earn trust, and like fidelity, trust is lost in a moment of indiscretion as a person abandons the old ways in favor of the new.
And it takes time to earn trust - not all time is worth the same amount.
If I hire you for five hours of your time, and you spend four of those hours looking at Instagram, you have not earned much of my trust.
But if you put your phone away, and if you focus and invest five hours of attentiveness, now we’re building a relationship.
And as our relationship deepens and evolves, we earn and build trust together, which creates a shared wisdom that cannot be purchased at any price.
Here’s something that’s fascinating:
This form of wealth flows thicker in communities that don’t have money, and conversely: when there’s a lot of money, people indulge behaviors that damage these forms of wealth.
In the absence of money, some people rediscover the old ways, but when money returns, some people abandon the ways that worked for their elders in favor of the new.
This damages trust, which damages systems of coordination necessary to mitigate fraud, waste, abuse, and corruption, which results in a greater number of economic refugees.
Perhaps you can see where I’ve been going with this.
Afterglow is what remains after the fire has done its heavy lifting. We’re becoming someone who expects warmth to exist because we’ve learned where to look to find it.
I’m not recommending that you become more optimistic, because that doesn’t work. I’m saying that this mindset makes you harder to discourage, and that’s not the same thing.
I don’t believe the future is gonna be better because “things are gonna get better,” I believe it’s going to be better because I’ve seen ordinary people improve the world over and over again without expectation of recognition, repayment, or reciprocity.
The afterglow
Challenge: how do you weave a foundation of moneyless wealth that creates a culture of stewardship that’s able to receive a flow of traditional forms of money, without allowing itself to become disrupted when the money finally arrives?