Do This and Live Longer, But Be Careful... The Cost of Gullibility

Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society

Photo by Theme Photos on Unsplash

An article tells us to trust in order to live longer. Can we?

Dear Reader: the following happened to a friend just this past week. I balance that story with an article that focuses on a key skill for longevity which shows up at a time when, frankly, who can we trust?

The garage door was very old, and finally just stopped working. One day all she could do was manually close it. Time to find a repair person.

She started out on Yelp, choosing a garage door repair company that had gotten excellent reviews.

Perfectly reasonable. She then reached out to one outfit to discuss what she needed. Suddenly, she started receiving all kinds of sales calls from competitors. Many of them had such strong accents she couldn’t make out what they were saying.

Several claimed that they were representatives of the company she’d just hired. She called back to that company and asked, and the company said they’d never heard of the person.

Huh. Interesting.

She and the company set a time, and she waited.

Then, a guy shows up at her house, saying he represented the garage door company she’d hired. She let him in, took him through the house and showed him the problem.

Something tipped her off; this guy wasn’t legit either.

She asked him for a business card: I don’t have mine yet. She asked him for the name of his manager: Oh, I can’t remember.

Hinky.

Red flag red flag red flag.

So she called the garage door company while the man was there. The man wasn’t theirs. He’d timed his arrival to beat the real repairman by just a few minutes so that he could get in the door first.

She invited the fake repairman (kicked him) out over his anger and protestations.

The real guy showed up a few minutes later and to her report, did a fine job.

Four hundred dollars and a top-notch repair later, the door was all fixed. That said, she was also shaken, which is when she called me, mad as hell. She has since called the police and multiple outfits to discuss elder abuse (she’s 68), and report concerns about fraud.

The guy knows where she lives, had been inside her home. She felt violated. Don’t blame her one bit. For all she knows, the whole purpose was to case her home for potential theft.

She has his number, reported him to multiple outlets. Her biggest concern was how many older people had been scammed as she almost had been.

When I asked if she had photographed his car, she said that getting his license plate felt invasive.

At that I spat out my coffee and we both laughed. Not any more it isn’t. And this is why:

Verify verify VERIFY.

And by the way, don’t use their phone number to call their supervisor. Call the number of the company you originally called, because the scammer will already have a system set up to fool you into believing you’re safe.

Her comment to me: when are these companies going to realize that these days, they need the same safety system as Uber? The name, photo, car type, license plate and the like.

That could be hacked, too. All too easily.

Mad as hell. I would be, too. Because this is a further invasion into what we should be able to trust.

Who do you trust? Who can you trust?

RealSimple featured a piece that underscored the importance of our ability to trust one another, whether it’s our neighbors, our doctors, members of our community.

Here’s the article promising longevity to trusting people.

From that article:

• People who are more trusting—especially in their close relationships—report lower stress, stronger emotional resilience, and better health outcomes.

• Building trust doesn’t require a leap of faith—it starts with observing reliability in everyday interactions and taking small, calculated emotional risks.

• Trust is about being open while also using discernment, trusting your instincts, and staying grounded in the present.

With thirty scammers a day coming after me via phone, email, text and likely through my salivary glands, I don’t trust much any more.

It’s my nature to trust because I work very hard to be trustworthy. My word really is my bond. Even if I’m going to be a few minutes late I call ahead to say so.

That’s important to me, and it’s important that people treat me with the same regard.

As a result I am constantly disappointed because integrity sure as hell is a thing of the past. People’s word is, well, negotiable.

Worse, social media has spawned legions of liars, made even better liars out of people who do it for a living and given the worst of us leverage to take advantage of people like my friend and me who are old enough and old-fashioned enough to believe in one another first.

I don’t wish at all to be so twisted that I peer at everyone with suspicious eyes. But I am vastly more careful than I used to be.

The highly successful effort by Certain Folks with a lot to gain has convinced us that the “government” is not to be trusted. Okay, much of today’s federal government leadership I don’t trust, but before DOGE the government was full of folks like my friend.

She cared deeply about public service and was committed to preventing waste, recycling furniture and computers and the like.

Lots of people are now gone, folks who cared passionately about federal lands and parks and people in need. Those much-maligned folks are now missing, and a great many of us are pissed off we aren’t getting the benefit of their hard work and commitment.

Like my friend.

She has been booted, and those in charge now, I most emphatically do NOT trust for good reason, more of which we see every day.

The cost of our inability to trust is high, according to research

This article from Pew Research speaks to where we’re heading. If trusting people leads to healthier lives, and it does, then it’s no wonder that people with overheated imaginations about the Deep State and Pizzagate and lizard people aren’t doing well.

The rest of us aren’t either, but possibly for different reasons.

From the Pew article:

Americans trust each other less than they did a few decades ago. The share of adults who said “most people can be trusted” declined from 46% in 1972 to 34% in 2018, according to the General Social Survey.

There’s a fascinating map in the Pew piece which shows which states have people who trust each other more than others. Oregon, where I now live, is one of them and I can tell you that you can see it in our everyday interactions.

You might be curious to see how education levels affect these choices.

My list: Who I trust and who I eyeball carefully or outright avoid

At the top of the list of folks I don’t trust: most politicians, preachers, PR people, physicians and podcasters who spew clickbait batshit crazy theories.

People who pray in THE most public way possible to convince you that the Sermon on the Mount doesn’t apply to them.

The more public the display, the less I buy the bullshit story. As for what people love to pound, as in the Bible, here’s what that says on the topic:

“When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men … but when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your father who is unseen.”- Jesus Christ

Just saying.

More people I don’t trust: Anyone wearing uniform AND a mask who is willing to do harm for profit without compunction and without due process.

Judges with god complexes. In 2019 I was in court for a minor traffic violation. I told the absolute truth. Judge assumed I was lying. I brought all kinds of proof; the more I brought the madder she got because she knew goddamned well she was wrong. She threw the book at me for that reason alone, especially after the prosecutor told her that there was nothing to prosecute. Such people need to be disbarred. Were I Black, I’d still be in jail for something I didn’t do.

Billionaires, trillionaires and anyone else who believes it’s all right to buy more climate-ruining yachts while billions starve.

I don’t trust Influencers. Social media personalities with huge followings based on…..not much other than a damned good sales pitch.

Anyone with a get-rich-quick, get-slim-quick, get-popular-quick, stop-aging-quick scheme. Because if any of that crap actually did work, they’d be rich as Croesus already. Read the tea leaves, people.

That includes all the folks on Substack who are selling that same Koolaid to make seven figures on Substack.

I don’t trust texts that say Hi, emails telling me my Microsoft account is overdue, phone numbers I don’t recognize.

Anyone willing to die in a ditch to be right, no matter how wrong they already know they are.

People I do trust: late night comedians.

People brave enough to stand up to fascism and Nazis. People smart and brave enough to take on the evil that surrounds us and risk everything. Right now that includes a select few politicians and a slew of incredibly competent Black women who are risking everything for ideals that people like me wore a uniform to protect.

The people we can trust are the ones who run towards us when we’re in trouble. Not away.

In case you missed it, more people you can’t trust: the few staffers who were working when a fire broke out at a senior home ran in the other direction without bothering to let anyone know. Nine residents died. Those people were entrusted with the care of vulnerable people. People who had families that cared about them.

So, I don’t trust senior care facilities in the United States.

I trust people who are willing to talk about the hard things whether or not our yard signs align.

People who understand that life is billions of shades of gray. That there really are no hard and fast answers to much of anything, if anything.

I trust people who can say I’m wrong, I have no idea, and other admissions of our aching, flawed humanity.

I trust and deeply respect people who have reflected on their actions and who have circled back to those they have damaged to own their shit.

People who fail, fail often, revel in the lessons, and keep trying.

People with moral courage, personal responsibility, deep humility and a love of the earth and everything in it. People who believe our forests and animals and oceans and creatures deserve our protection.

People who have traveled enough to understand privilege, poverty, the idiocy of racism, and who see themselves in all the people of the world, for we really are one.

People who set and respect reasonable boundaries. Who don’t look to blame others for whatever is wrong with their lives.

People who will risk standing up for someone or some creature who is being attacked, abused or threatened. Who will do the right thing because it is the right thing, not so that they can get some damned performative YouTube video out of it.

I particularly trust people who have a wicked sense of humor, the absurd, which is daily.

People who know that none of us knows shit, not really, and can say that out loud. Laughing.

Those folks are trustworthy.

Not a comprehensive list. But it explains why some people are in my life and others are not. It explains what happens when I die that what little I have is distributed to people whose work I trust.

Be trustworthy. Stand by your word. Do what you say you’re going to do. Be the person you wish other people would be for you. Earn your own trust first.

I’m still working on that. Will be until the day the waters take me home.

Meanwhile, in an increasingly predatory world, I verify.

Who do you trust? I’ll know it’s gotten bad if I demand to see my own identification in the bathroom mirror.

Let’s play.

Photo by Kiana Bosman on Unsplash

Thanks for reading. Some topics are more challenging than others, and this was one as the subject is a very close friend. As we age into our elder years we are a highly vulnerable population. Just one reason why I encourage all of us to keep our brains sharp with good habits- it can be a shark feed out there. Please consider: