We often calculate value in weights or numbers. But real value isn’t immediately quantifiable - like shelter, knowledge, or trust. When you’re trying to extract value out of something, you’re doing it because you trust the outcome. The value of entertainment from seeing someone, or the value of knowledge you’ll gain from reading your favorite book. If you didn’t trust the outcome, you wouldn’t do it.

I ran into a simple but important problem the other day trying to trade assets. Should I save 0.3% on the swap using an unfamiliar product, or should I pay that fraction to use a platform that I’ve come to trust? The cheaper option worked. It even promised more. But it lacked the one invisible asset I realized I needed: assurance.

It was because I trusted the platform, that I didn’t mind to pay extra - literally losing value - so that I could be satisfied with the outcome. That’s the thing about trust: it’s both priceless and costly. It takes years to build through reliability, honesty, and showing up even when it’s easier not to. And the hardest part? It only takes seconds to shatter trust.

We trust our friends not because they’re perfect, but because we’ve seen who they are when it counts. We trust certain platforms not because they’re the cheapest, but because they’ve proven they won’t let us down. Trust is the glue that holds everything together - relationships, systems, decisions, even identity.

In life, like in markets, shortcuts may offer more on the surface. But long roads built on trust offer something rarer: peace. The decision to trust, or to be trustworthy, isn’t a strategic maneuver but a principle.

Trust, it turns out, is the highest yield investment.

That 0.3% wasn’t a fee. It was a toll paid to cross the bridge of certainty. We don’t pay to trust. We pay because we trust.

So maybe the better question isn’t “What’s the cost of trust?” but “What’s the cost of living without it?”