Is your day-to-day life still interesting to you?
Last Friday I shared an early finding from the little quiz I built about how people balance purpose, duty, and self. It seemed to strike a chord, so here's the next thing the data revealed.
I went looking for what predicts whether a person trusts other people. A client and I had a conversation a little while ago about how world view, and in particular trust in other people to do the right thing, proxies political persuasion in the current environment.
I assumed what drove trust in other people would be something weighty, like loneliness, or whether people's life feels meaningful. It turned out to be neither of those. The strongest link so far is almost embarrassingly mundane: whether your day-to-day life still feels interesting to you.
The people who've lost interest in their own days are, by some distance, the least likely to believe other people can be trusted. The two appear to move together.
Now, the part my old research self insists I say out loud. This is 124 responses. It's the strongest signal from the research so far, not a law of human nature, and at this size almost everything I'm finding is indicative rather than conclusive. I can see the shape of something interesting, but I can't yet pull apart what it actually means, whether interest in life builds trust, or whether trust is what makes life feel interesting in the first place, or whether some third thing sits underneath both. That's the genuinely fun work, and it needs real numbers before it's worth doing.
I spent years in research and insight where a thin study meant 500 instead of 2,000 respondents per country, and I will admit I miss that kind of power behind a dataset. 124 is a lovely start, but it's a start.
The more people who take this, the sooner the indicative becomes the robust, and the sooner I can share the patterns I'm sitting on that I don't yet trust myself to talk about.
So if you've got two minutes, I'd love you to add yours. And if you found this interesting, sending it to one other person genuinely moves this forward.
The survey is here: www.emilyinpublic.com/survey. Your time is appreciated!
Emily Hunt-Adiletta OBE is a bestselling author and keynote speaker.
Booking: booking@anthroadvisory.com
