Category: Published

Whatever happened to trust?

Two ravens on an empty bench
©2026 Bard – When people stop gathering…

Trust is an essential ingredient of any functional social system. From families to nations, to global organizations, without trust everything becomes a lot harder. When trust between people is lacking, a lot of time and effort needs to be spent on formalizing understanding and safeguarding agreements. Constant vigilance is required to ensure actions are taken as agreed on and intentions and communications stay aligned with the official purpose and missions of the social entity people are part of. When things gets worse, the lack of trust can cause organizations to fail and fall apart.

You would think, therefore, that wise leaders all over the world, recognizing this danger, are working tirelessly to fix this issue. Yet, if we are to believe the Edelman Trust Barometer, over the past decades, trust has continued to decline.

Why?

One reason may be that science, business, and politics are trying to fix the problem where it is the most visible: on the world stage, inside international markets, between nations, across regions, … But trying to repair the damage where it appears is a fool’s errand when the real cause happens on a much smaller, more localized scale.

Trust is something that exists between people that know each other well enough to feel they can rely each other, predict each other’s actions, and understand each others’ motivations, beliefs, and convictions. Trusting people we know well and regularly deal with comes natural to us. The more we interact with and rely on the people that are close to us, the more confident we become that we can trust them to help us when we need it, just as we become more inclined to help them when they are in need of us.

Local trust tends to grow outwards and upwards. People that live in high-trust communities are much more inclined to extend that trust to ‘others’ – visitors, strangers, other groups they are not directly connected to – as well as to the larger social structures they are embedded in. It is as if trust can become a habit, and habituated local trust can grow into habituated global trust, if given enough encouragement.

But even local trust needs constant maintenance. People need to be in regular contact with each other. They need to engage in shared activities, where they can help each other, work on shared goals, share stories and ideas, and regularly reconfirm the confidence they have in each other’s intentions and actions. When they stop regularly getting together, their habitual, automatic trust in each other gradually weakens.

When local groups fragment, trust bleeds out of their systems. When people become more focused on their individual needs and desires; when they stop sharing and collaborating on a regular basis, trust stops being the default attitude towards others. When local trust vanishes, the habit of trusting anything at all quickly follows. The more isolated we become in our highly privatized individual worlds, the less inclined we are to trust the big, anonymous and somewhat abstract world outside.

It seems the root of our global problem is a local phenomenon. What does this tell us about how we can solve the global trust issues? That is something for a future post.

Trust me, I will get back to you soon.

©2026 Bard

The Joy of Work

A Healthy Mix

The pond, frozen
@2025 Bard – Pondering the pond

Previously, I said the way to become more productive is to focus more on the quality and value of what you do than on the quantity. It’s not how much you do, it’s how much what you do matters.

That sounds great (at least it does to me), but how do you choose? Out of everything on your to-do list, what has the most value? What makes the most difference?

I have a recipe for that I can fall back on when I find myself at junction of a myriad of possible workflows to step into. The recipe calls for a healthy mix of different types of work, like a balanced meal. It mixes four ingredients, in equal measures. Let me explain.

The Recipe

The ingredients are 4 different types of task/activity. I call them: goalpost movers, enjoying life, necessary maintenance, and recharging time.

Goalpost Movers

Life is not a static situation, but a journey into the future. You determine that journey by the choices you make, over and over again. If you are clear about your goals and ambitions, as I try to be, you want to see progress in the right direction. You want so yourself moving closer to your destination.

For this reason, when plan my work-week, I look first for things that I can do this week that are most in line with the future I envision for myself. I keep this work at the top of my list, and pick 3 of them as targets for the week. I call these the goalpost moving tasks. Per day I reserve time for these tasks, but not so much they take up all of the day. The goal is to have them done by the end of the week. Not to rush through them at the expense of everything else.

Enjoying Life

But life is not just about achieving goals. Life is also about experiencing life itself. The journey, and especially the full appreciation of it, may be even more important than the destination it leads to.

Every day I make sure to at least 3 experience-related task or activity. These are very personal choices, so you will have to find your own. For me, they are things like taking a stroll across our forest property, playing a bit of piano, talking to my wife, reading a book, … Anything that feels good and is active but not too demanding. It’s these activities that help me look back at most days, knowing that they have been good days. Spread out over the month, I also include a few “mini vacations”: concerts, shows, day-trips and other non-work outings my wife and I enjoy immensely.

Necessary Maintenance

Not everything I do is ambitious or enjoyable. Another necessary pick for the week is the kind of work that comes with my responsibilities as a husband, father, home owner, citizen, and human being. Some physical exercise, cooking dinner, making coffee, small repairs, mowing the lawn, doing my tax returns, talking to the neighbours, being active in the community, … The list goes on.

I sprinkle my days with a few small ones, like making coffee and cooking dinner. The bigger ones I try to spread out across the week, or month, depending on how much time and effort they take. I try, as much as possible, to approach them as enjoying life tasks, so they don’t feel too much like work. When that doesn’t work (I just can’t get myself to enjoy tax returns, for instance), I overcome my resistance by accepting them as necessary maintenance – not always pleasant, not always light, but simply part of maintaining a reasonable standard of living.

Recharging Time

And then there is a fourth category that is often overlooked, because it doesn’t feel like work at all. That is the time I need to recover and recharge. My energy and focus are limited resources that drain quickly the harder I work. Once depleted, they need to be refilled, which can only be achieved by doing absolutely nothing, or at least as little as humanly possible.

I do an afternoon meditation, sit by the pond thinking of nothing, or take a power nap. Once a day, at minimum, I force myself to switch off completely, no matter how stressed for time I may be. If I don’t, my productivity goes into a sharp decline, to the point that I would have been better off taking the time doing nothing rather than spending hours slogging on.

Mixing it up

There you have it. Four ingredients to choose from and mix them into an active but balances daily rhythm. It is this balanced mix of different kinds of activities, including doing nothing, that give me the satisfying feeling that I am not just achieving my goals, but am also enjoying the journey, while maintaining a lifestyle I want, without completely wearing myself out in the process.

You know what the most surprising part of all this is? I have found myself, over time, doing less, while achieving more. The stricter I am with sticking to this mix of things to work on and the more I stop myself from pushing myself beyond my own limits, the more I get done that really matters. Making a difference, while enjoying the journey. Moving forward without wearing out.

It’s highly recommended.

@2026 Bard