We spent some time with my oldest friends I have since arriving in Finland, people I have known since almost day one. Next month will be the start of my nineteenth year as a foreigner, which is getting closer to half of my life living outside of my home country. Although I have been here so long that I forget that I am not local, which is weird since I barely speak the language.
It was good to get together with the couple growing families at one of their places, with a new edition to the group only two months old and super cute. Our daughter was really excited to have four kids around her own age to play with also and for the four hours we were there, we hardly saw any of them, other than when the grilled burgers were ready, and of course the berries and ice cream. The rest of the time, they were entertaining themselves on the trampoline, running around the yard kicking a ball or overloading a swing set.
We don't get together nearly as often as we should, as life gets in the way, but when we do, it is like it always has been over the years - relaxed and natural. The amount of nights out I have spent with these people and the amounts of drinks we have consumed together is very high, as are all the other parts of life.
There have been so many life events over the years, with parties, relationships made and lost, weddings, children, divorces, miscarriages and illnesses all rolled into a couple of decades of shared experience. The network of interaction that stems from this small hub is immense, as it is when looking at the distribution of life across populations of friends and acquaintances that come and go.
We talked a lot of the past and a little about the recent events of my stroke, as it was as much of a surprise to them, as it was to my own family that it happened. They know me well enough to recognize that there have been effects on me and can likely pinpoint certain aspects that illustrate it, such as my speech pattern and flow, or my struggle to pull the conversation together cleanly and seamlessly. What is nice is that they can note these things and have no fear in mentioning them to me, rather than just pretend they didn't see it. I value their honesty.
Honesty doesn't mean truth, something people often get confused it seems. People often say they are "telling the truth" about some topic, when what they are doing is giving their evaluation, correct or not, about how they see a situation. this is why multiple people who experience to the same event can have very different honest opinions about it. This gets even more convoluted when incentive and personal agenda comes into play.
A lot of "truth seekers" for example will tell their opinion honestly without considering a whole range of aspects that bring it into question, including why they think it is the truth in the first place. One of the interesting things I find about a lot of the conspiracy crowd is, many of them have zero direct experience with anything that they are talking about, it is all second, third, fourth hand or more information where they have to trust the source, even though they do not know that source or the incentives or agendas that source may have.
While this doesn't automatically make the information or opinions incorrect, it should raise a healthy level of caution if looking to take what is said as truth, especially if going to act upon it. The caution should also be extended to ourselves when we consume information that we consider too, as our own agendas come into play also. For example, a lot of people get sucked into scams, not because the scam was clever, but they wanted to believe because they desired the outcome.
This is easy to illustrate financially, but the same concepts can be applied to all kinds of information that we consider and make a decision on. People buy TV-Shopping exercise equipment that promises results in 7 days because they want to believe and, they do not want to do the work in the same way that someone transfers crypto or their master keys to some random account that sent them a message on discord. There is a greed aspect to it - desire.
The internet is rife with "truth tellers" who market all kinds of concepts to the unknown audience in the hope for attention, money, popularity, power or a hundred other self-serving reasons - all while they get the feeling they are telling "the" truth, not "their" truth.
The internet is a candy store full of a millions dispensers of a billion flavors and you are able to choose which you want to fill your bag with and while there are fragments of truth in each, none are wholly truthful and all are often filled with knowingly dishonest people, purporting to tell the truth on a subject. It doesn't matter if it is economy or Covid, nutrition or crypto -
Don't take candy from strangers.
But, one of the benefits of having a group of good friends like I have is that, while none of us are completely right in our evaluations, knowledge or opinions, we can all trust from many years of conversations that we want the best for each other. There is value in social trust and capital and something that is hard to build up without a lot of shared experience. Together, we have a candy store of stories to tell too and so many overlaps that we can cross-reference our lives through each other's eyes from many perspectives. It is mini web of trust IRL.
Everyone has an agenda, but not all are sweet.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]