A Tale of Unconscious Trust

What strangers made me learn about myself

Photo by Sean Oulashin on Unsplash, rendered black & white by me

I get often asked for my opinion. 

This might sound totally normal, but the circumstances around this question are far from typical.

What makes my case atypical is that it’s not just the “What’s your view of the war in Ukraine?” or “Do you think this dress makes me look fat?” type of opinion seeking. If it did, it would be nothing to write home about. 

People want to know what I think of their personal matters. In fact, very personal -- a delicate decision they have to make at home, a heated argument they had with their spouse, a life-changing pivot they’ve been thinking about, a health-related issue they’re struggling with, a sexual concern they’ve been keeping to themselves.

Things that, before venturing into any type of comment or consideration, make me want to say “Please, lie down on the couch”.   

Now, by “people” I mean those who know me, of course. Family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances. And in a way, you could expect those close to you to open up on their personal situations and ask for your view -- it may happen. So, nothing weird here.  

But here’s where it gets weird: “people” often include strangers.

Like that one time on a flight from New York to Rome, when the guy seated next to me, who doesn’t even know my name (let alone what I do for a living), starts a monologue about the excellent results the company he’s working at will report next week, and how sure he is that as soon as that happens the stock price is going to skyrocket, to finish with an explosive “What should I do? Should I buy some shares? Cause, you know, I could use some extra cash to pay for my summer vacation” (for those not into stocks and stock markets: this is a crime called insider trading, for which you can go to prison).  

Or that other time when, in a doctor’s waiting room, this middle-aged gentleman comes in and sits next to me and, after a couple of standard, small-talk questions, to which I kindly reply, he tells me all about the affair he’s been having for years and “Should I finally come out and tell my wife?”.

Or when, in line at the post office, the lady behind me pulls a picture of a girl out of her purse and shows it to me, saying “Look how beautiful my daughter is. Should I try and convince my husband to have another one?”.   

I could go on and on, but you get the point -- I am a magnet for these things. In the most unexpected ways, I get hit by strangers who seem to have a desperate desire to share a personal dilemma with me. And in so doing, they unveil their most intimate side to reveal their deepest, darkest secrets.

Why do strangers open up to me? More importantly, why do they ask for my opinion on their personal matters? Even more importantly, how can my opinion be possibly valuable to someone who doesn’t even know my name? I’m not rich, or a celebrity, or the author of a New York Times bestseller, or some visionary whose nuggets of wisdom are as precious as the ocean’s treasures.

I’m just a regular guy. A nobody.

I believe it all revolves around trust. But how can they possibly trust a Nobody whom they have never seen before? Trust is a strange animal. It can be earned in a million different ways, but, to do that, you have to be given an initial opportunity. Yet this initial opportunity is often “awarded” on the basis of some unconscious mechanism at play. There’s no way the guy seated next to me on that New York-Rome flight or the guy in that doctor’s waiting room or that lady at the post office consciously knew that I am a trustworthy human being. So, the decision to entrust me with their personal confessions had to be unconscious.

An unconscious decision to trust someone unknown is, by definition, hard to rationalize. It might be based on a million different factors, like smell, gaze, body language, tone of voice, perceived calm, or sense of safety. In my case, I really wouldn’t know what to say. It might be a combination of all of the above. 

What I do know is that the way I have dealt with these occurrences helped me understand better who I am. It revealed something about me, to myself. It’s not just a matter of the answer I gave (in most cases, I even found it irrelevant), it’s how I caught myself reacting to the whole situation, as awkward as it may be. When the person seated next to you on the train, out of the blue, tells you about his health condition and asks you whether he should try to make peace with his son, with whom he hasn’t spoken in years, because “I don’t know how much time I have left”, you just freeze. Then you feel scared, surprised and burdened with responsibility at the same time. 

I guess the most important thing I learned about myself in these types of situations is that I am more of a caring person than I would have imagined. How easy would it be to just get up and leave, or turn to the other side pretending nobody’s there? Or make fun of the guy? I’ve never backed down.   

Yes, I do attract weirdos with funny questions. I don’t know why, but it happens. It happened when I was in my twenties, and it keeps happening now that I’m in my fifties. What felt like a game at twenty, feels like a blessing at fifty. The blessing of having the chance to learn about myself through these encounters, of being the beneficiary of unconscious trust, of sensing that the words I choose might help, or encourage, or reassure someone whom I’ll never see again, who will never see me again.

Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired magazine, writer and thinker, in the piece “103 bits of advice I wish I had known” that he published on his 70th birthday wrote:

“You will be judged on how well you treat those who can do nothing for you.”

Isn’t this why we are here?

---

If you liked this piece, I’d be truly grateful if you shared it.

And if you’re not yet a subscriber and just stumbled upon this page because someone shared it or by divine intervention, and you liked it, please do subscribe to receive my writing every week in your inbox.