The cost of cynicism

After being bulled in middle school and high school, I grew into a very cynical person: distrusting not just of peers, but also colleagues in the workplace early in my career.

The rationale was simple: if you establish a very high bar of trust and generally assume people are looking out for themselves, then you reduce your risk of harm.

…But there’s a cost to this kind of cynicism that shouldn’t be ignored.

You give up the opportunity to develop deeper connections with the people around you. You feel like you must always be looking over your shoulder, which can be quite exhausting.

Overtime these costs became more apparent and started weighing me down — eventually I decided that this is no way to live.

Learning to be more vulnerable and defaulting to trust more often seems like a more worthy price to pay if it means being able to more readily develop meaningful relationships and feeling more at ease.

Of course you can go too far in the other direction, becoming too trusting and vulnerable. There is a balance.

I offer no simple answers here, this is just my thought process to date. In the end, we all have to figure out where on the spectrum we prefer to be.