trust falls
This weekend, Geof and I have to decide whether to close on a community land project that will cost hundreds of hours of work from both of us, and 1.4 million dollars that we are ultimately responsible for.
It’s a number that boggles me. How can anything cost that much? How can just putting in roads cost almost $400,000 - more than the land those roads are on? How, for that matter, can we even imagine terraforming 30 acres of wild hills into a neighborhood for ourselves, our friends, and 6 families we don’t even yet know? What insanity leads us to believe that is possible?
In four years of looking for a home in Asheville, this is the closest we’ve come to the point of no return. The project has expanded, contracted, and expanded again. It’s almost died more times than I can count. Now, with all the due diligence done on the latest piece; with the contractor quotes in, possible but high enough to reify the risk; with the county semi-agreeable to our plan - we at last need, have the chance, to decide.
This project is not just ours. It is ours, our friends’ and current landmates’, and all those who will live there with us. We cannot fund, build, or believe in it without those people.
Do we have 1.4 million dollars worth of trust in them?
What is “trust”, anyways?
To me, trust is an equation with multiple parts:
Past experience of this person
Past experience of humans in general
Clear, concrete, and verified agreements
The math looks like this:
Positive experiences and impressions of you — Negative experiences of you — Negative experiences of others like you + Agreements = TRUST
…then multiply that complexity by the number of people involved in a project. Right?
But even that has its problems.
“Trust” is often used as a catch-all term for “prediction”. I “trust” you to be the person I predict you are, based on your past actions. But people’s actions are often situation-specific: what we think is our “personality” is, more than we’d like to admit, a set of predetermined responses to a situation. Change the situation, and you change the person’s actions. Different variables are at play.
