Year of Discovery (Week 15: Perceived Trust and Time)
I escaped the cold of Nairobi this week and went to the coast of Kenya. The warm sun and clear skies — tempered with some moments of rainfall — have put an end to my shivers. I’m grateful for the varying climates of Kenya’s different cities, the sounds of the ocean waves, and the leaves of the palm trees as they sway in the wind.
In my personal exploration, I did a BaZi (八字) reading this week, an ancient (4500+ years old) Chinese metaphysical form. The idea is that the moment we are born, we capture the imprint of the universe at that point. Rather than ‘telling me my destiny’, the person who shared my BaZi chart said that the reading encourages free will and enables one to learn how to control certain natural impulses. It helped me reaffirm more clearly my nature vs my nurture.
This week’s reflections stemmed from a small incident, which in day-to-day life can lead to some of the bigger reflections. On Monday, I was on a boda going from one place to another and felt a tightened urgency in my chest. The boda driver seemed to be making some wrong turns (according to what I was seeing on Google Maps). I felt compelled to ask him to follow the directions on his phone. When I asked him if he knew the way, he said yes, so I didn’t push on. He ended up turning onto different side roads that got us to our destination faster than I expected and I thanked him for the ride. The feeling of surprise made me reflect more on knowledge as power and my relationship with time.
Perceived Trust, Knowledge, and Information
From the boda ride, I thought more about the role that technology has played in how I perceive trust (or what truth to believe in). The internet has flattened our access to knowledge in a way that no other generation has had before. But a spillover effect of this access to knowledge is a sense that knowledge and information are power — and that all of the answers can be found in the palm of my hand (hence my confidence in Google Maps over the driver’s know-how).
But the question is: what is trust if knowledge and information are not driven by humans? While I thought that the majority of internet engagement online is human, studies generally suggest that less than 60% of web traffic is human, and according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is a bot.
For a period of time in 2013…a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.”
In this same article, author Max Read argues that on the internet, metrics, people, businesses, content, politics, and we ourselves are fake.
So if the internet has fake and real content, people, etc — what can I trust? How is it any more or less valid than the information that people share with me in real life? I know there have been many times where Google Maps has let me down, so why do I continue to trust Maps more?
For me, I want to continuously remind myself that my relationship with technology and the internet needs to be driven by my values first (instead of informing my values). Technology and the internet are tools that can be used to hurt or help the connections we make every day, which results in more or less suffering. For example, technology can reduce trust between people in instances when one person points to Maps or information online to refute a point instead of actually listening to the other person.
The other reality is that only 59.5% of the global population uses the internet. While technology adoption is growing, it’s not as pervasive as we may think and there is a lot of deep and inherent knowledge that people have which ‘hasn’t been digitized’. I wonder too what types of knowledge can’t be digitized and what is being lost as we move our confidence into our digital devices to have the answers to where we are going — literally and figuratively.
What I learned from this experience is to be clearer with myself on how I would want my values to show up in my actions and behaviors and to dig deeper when I have the feeling inside that my values and actions are misaligned.
Questions to reflect on (I’d love to hear your ideas — please share with me directly or in the comments!):
- What is the role of the internet today in your life and what do you want it to be in relation to how you attain and use knowledge and information?
- What do we lose and gain within our trust and relationships with other people because of the internet? How do we counter that with our values? How else can we counter the ways in which the internet does not serve us?
- How can we use the internet to build a more trusting and less divided society and world? What are other ways for us to build a more trusting world?
Time: Relative Comparison and Physics
After the boda ride, I also thought more about the way I value and understand time through relative comparison and through the laws of physics.
I can see that my relationship with time is determined by a set of relative beliefs I place on the way I spend time. It’s easy for me to get lost staring at my phone for 15–20 minutes without a clear output or outcome of how I spent the time. I justify it with ‘it’s okay to take it easy’. But when I’m heading somewhere and Google Maps shows me I’ve lost 5 minutes of time going the wrong way, I feel frustrated and the ‘time is precious’ belief dominates my thoughts. This highlights to me how important it is to continue to explore my beliefs and how they show up. To live a happy and peaceful life, it’s about setting boundaries around mindless activities that I know don’t foster more peace or happiness (like scrolling through content on my phone). It’s also about understanding and choosing what I get frustrated by. When the agitated thoughts arise, I can choose to allow those thoughts to dominate my mind space and snowball, or I can choose to see them as minimal challenges that I won’t let bother me.
The boda ride also made me think more about a book I read a few years ago: The Order of Time by physicist Carlo Rovelli. In the book (I highly recommend it!), Rovelli shares many lessons on time vis-a-vis physics, perception, and life; namely, he shares that time doesn’t move uniformly as we might believe (reality: time passes at different speeds in different places and also passes at different rates in the same place). He also talks about how the experience of time is a creation of our mind. Thinking back on the book, I realize that my own suffering or anxiety when it comes to time has come from an elusive idea that there is true objectivity to time, rather than how time is only real in relation to the way I perceive it and my expectations.
“Because everything that begins must end. What causes us to suffer is not in the past or the future: it is here, now, in our memory, in our expectations. We long for timelessness, we endure the passing of time: we suffer time. Time is suffering.” — Rovelli
While Rovelli says time is suffering, he also shares that the experience of time can be joyful depending on how we look at it. From this, a takeaway from this reflection is for me to continue to check in with my perception. If everything is constantly in motion (like time) and there isn’t a singular truth, then what’s most important is for me to be aware of my perceptions and shift them to manifest a kind, patient and peaceful reality.
Questions to reflect on (I’d love to hear your ideas — please share with me directly or in the comments!):
- What is your relationship to time? How does what you spend your time on reflect what you value versus what you don’t?
- Do you engage with time with abundance or scarcity? How would you like to engage with time?
- How do you want to spend your minutes, hours, days?
What I read this week: Flowers of Algernon (I don’t remember the last time I finished a book in a day — I highly recommend it!)
