Trust, friendship, truth and honesty

The above are, near universally, considered very important, and perhaps even necessary, in any relationship (relationship being interactions between people rather than describing a specific romantic attachment); and yet they can very easily conflict with each other within a relationship (rather than within an individual). The most obvious example would be between honesty and truth, one person can express information gained from another source with perfect honesty and belief, which is never the less known to be untrue. Similarly being honest and admitting a past transgression can break a trust, despite the intuitively complimentary natures of honesty and trust, the can in fact break each other. 

Now sadly my abilities as a linguist, poet or even basic wordsmith are rather limited (refer to my lovely absence of full stopes for further confirmation) however with the horribly deficient tools at my disposal I will attempt to explore at least some of the above concepts. Trust, is that simply an expectation of honesty which is reflective of given morals? I trust that 1+1=2, similarly I trust that my friends will not spread heinous rumours about me, seems quite simple, and yet... certainly we all see flaws in our friends, some people are gossips, some people have tendencies to perhaps embellish somewhat on the truth, yet we can so often still naively believe that they will act against their nature in the context of your friendship with them, even knowing they do not with others (note, that thought isn’t going anywhere, I just kinda wrote it down anyway).

To redefine the prior concepts, how does this relationship seem?

Trust = true if, honesty = truth

Then if true

Friendship = trust if truth = morally acceptable behaviour

I think that works doesn’t it? If we can trust someone to do the right thing, we are their friend? That is obviously a surface evaluation of a complex problem, with different levels involved in all variables which could potentially change the values, but from the above it can seemingly be concluded that friendship is a simple and easily solved equation, and chances are that most people are in fact worthy of friendship from any given individual based on the general overlap of morals in society. The conclusion I must then come to, is that as individuals we misinterpret information to change the variables when creating imbalances in this equation, the easiest mistakes to make are obviously in the honesty = truth segment, if you trust more than one person, and those people have different sources of information on a given topic, they will both honestly give you opinions they see as true but which may be inconsistent..... I’m sure we see where this is going. Friendships are fragile, ultimately I believe we can reduce this equation further. If you care about someone, then it basically just doesn’t matter, we will get emotionally biased, ignore the facts, and make snap judgements.

So where does this leave the concepts of truth honesty friendship and trust? We might say we need them all, but at the end of the day any and all of them are only going to be applied when we emotionally want them to be, we will ignore the facts when it suits us, and ultimately we are all more fallible than we might like to think.

life, time and priorities

the interesting codependency of life and priorities within time struck me earlier, we structure our lives based on our priorities, which in turn change due to our lives. one example (if you will pardon my horrible stereotyping) woman wants career, cool, structures her life around said priority, also cool, reaches a point in her life where the fact that she has not yet had children becomes a concern, becoming a mother is then the new priority which leads to the career being scaled back to accommodate. now obviously this specific case is an obscene generalisation but it does serve to illustrate the way in which what we want in life and how we behave to get it can in fact be conflicting due to their codependency, if we find a specific interest which we could then know to be our real lifes goal, and tailor our lives towards that, well that would be splendid, but due to the changeable nature of our priorities, the decisions we make with our lives, can in fact serve to hamper our achievements later in life. another example (purely because it occurred to me :P) a young person wants to be in a rock group, and chooses to get a number of tattoos and piercings which are fully in keeping with that desire, a few years pass, they gain a qualification in their chosen academic field, and begin going to job interviews. strangely in a professional environment people who have tattoos and piercings can be seen as less mature, thus someones past desires hinder them in their future endeavors. with our environment constantly changing and us changing with it, every moment holds an intrinsic opportunity or choice (using the word for want of a better one despite my obviously fatalistic tendencies) which could allow that moment to dramatically impact on any future aims or desires (maybe you saw a man in a suit with a nose ring and laughed to yourself right before deciding that you wouldnt get your own piercings?). conclusively, dont blink, because you never know what that moment you missed might have meant for your future.