Reliable

Elder people often remember fondly the times when "a man's word had worth". Not like back then there weren't people who cheated and lied, but back in the day - according to our grandparents or great grandparents - if someone said something, you could actually expect that person to keep it up. Back in the day "reliable" was a good, expected quality that was cultivated, but which has gone out of practice today.

Today promises sound simply like ear candy of things we sure won't see done. A boss promises us that things will be better and nice at the job, and we automatically read this as an statement that thing will remain the same, the boss don't care about what's really going on (screensaver bosses) or that things will get worse from here on. A significant other promises to make an effort and stop cheating or start helping out with the chores or pay more attention, pick up the kids from school, walk the dog, find a good job, stop spending so much money... and we read this promise as meaning the opposite. A bank promises you a loan or a mortgage with good conditions and affortable payments and you know it means that they will grab you by the neck and asphixiate you at the first available chance. A politician promises to change things in the country and you know that the only thing changing will be the pockets into which goes our tax money.

How can we actually live in a world that's not reliable? A world where your job can disappear any minute leaving you in the air with any of the promised guarantees (severance packages and notice period), which happens more often than you'd think, or the severance packages are "recalculated" on a lot of items, to make it smaller than what it should be? A world where a single word in the news can't be taken at face value, for most broadcasting and newspaper companies have their own agenda and are known to publish only the news that serve their purposes? A world where even parents lie to their kids and where such parents systematically fail them? How do we live in a world where we are surrounded by people, companies, institutions and entities you can't trust?

The problem with reliability goes far beyond these too. Thanks to the current loose policies for graduating people, the many cheap universities and corrupt systems, we have a quite significant number of unreliable professionals who do their job by seeking excuses and finding way to pass the blame to others. As results we get crappy goods and crappy services and all sorts of half assed solutions.

The problem of reliability is global, is everywhere and in everything, and you can often see it in the way people think, "changing their minds" as they change friends or as the political climate changes. And it's not like they really changed their minds, for there's absolutely nothing wrong with changing one's mind - this is part of the process of intelectual evolution, as you improve your personal ideals and philosophy - but they change their speech often so radically, it makes you wonder if there ever was any "mind" any real thought and conviction behind it.

Reliability must be reclaimed, and it is a though process, but just like with the process of teaching people to recycle, to classify their garbage, to reuse and rethink, reject plastic bags and so on, if we start by being reliable ourselves, by passing on this value to the next generation - be it our own children or not - then there might be a future out there where a person's word will worth again.