For most my life, I assumed the worst in people.

I assumed people were dangerous, untrustworthy, naive, stupid, uninteresting and pathologically selfish. It was up to them to prove to me that they weren’t these things, and then we could start being friends.

These questions made me terrified of interacting with strangers. I make no eye contact when walking in public, interacted solely with my friendship group and rarely revealed my secrets to anyone.

But recently, as part of a social experiment, I’ve decided to take the opposite approach: to assume the best in people. That means to assume people are trustworthy, intelligent, kind-hearted, immensely talented, can keep secrets and have a strong moral compass. With this baseline, everybody is a friend by default. If they later prove to me that they shouldn’t be a friend, I gently let them go.

This experiment has gone on for about one year now. Having to drastically re-engineer my worldview has been exhausting at times, but overall it has been a wonderful gift.

What I’ve come to realise is people tend to become the person you perceive them to be. If you don’t trust anybody and keep to yourself, people owe you nothing and have less reason to back you. But if you give people the responsibility of your trust, they generally live up to it and prove themselves to be trustworthy.

If you think people are dumb, you will never ask anyone interesting or difficult questions so they will never have a chance to prove their intellect. But if you believe people are smart and give them a chance to speak, even the most unreflective minds might surprise you. The way you see people is the way you treat them, and the way you treat them is what they become.

I wish I could go back and tell little Eric to chill out a little more. I would urge him to see the world as a good place, rather than an evil one, because this would make the world a better place. Being cautious has its context, but to constantly walk in fear and suspicion seems like a sad road to embark on.