It’s one thing to give someone the benefit of the doubt and take them at their word. But it’s quite another when we take their word for something rather than doing our due diligence to discover what is true ourselves. This is bad faith.
Bad faith is when we live our life based on someone else’s belief rather than our own.
For instance, this can be as simple as a book or restaurant recommendation – adopting the opinion of others rather than reading the book or going to the restaurant ourselves.
We might also choose to like or dislike a public figure based solely on the views of those around us rather than making our own informed decisions.
And unfortunately, many of our religious and political affiliations follow a similar suit. Perhaps we’re simply following the tradition of our family, but we’ve not yet done the inner work to discover what we actually believe.
And it’s not that these positions are wrong per se. In fact, they can be objectively right.
The problem is that the position is not our own. We’ve neglected our responsibility to discover what is true as we passively adopt the opinion of others.
This robs us of our vitality and ability to make a meaningful impact. There are no good faith contributions to make when we’ve been living in bad faith.
When the decision happens to be for something good then maybe we’ve just shortchanged our potential. But our bad faith can cause much damage when we blindly adopt harmful opinions.
Either way, it’s our responsibility to discover what we believe and to live our life accordingly. Of course, others still influence us, but the buck stops with us.
Don’t live in bad faith. Be courageous in discovering what you believe for yourself.
Photo by John Fornander on Unsplash
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