I have long thought sincerity is the virtuest of all virtues.

I still believe this today.

Yet, I have found out that sometimes sincerity is extremely hard to achieve. Why so? Imagine that you’re with a woman, a gorgeous one at that, and you talk about a project. At a certain point she says: “I see you’re thinking about something, please tell me about it, be sincere.” At that point your head is swirling with ideas, personal, professional, contextual, sexual, you know, a thousand sounds at a time. Which one goes first?

The above was an actual situation. So my actual answer was: “Which one of my 6 parallel thoughts would you like to hear?” Indeed. Which one? I will never know whether she meant this personally, professionally, contextually, sexually, or whicheverually. The obvious freudian answer would be: “I’d like to get laid with you, asap”, yet what if that was not the loudest of the voices at that time. I mean, I’d like to get laid asap with most of the girls I talk to, most of the times, but not always. There are times other things come first, however unbelievable that is.

Now imagine a situation that has no sexual overtones. A dry business situation. There’s a challenge. Five projects compete in order of priority, there are three of us discussing this, each of us has bias, and then the obvious question comes: “Gregor, which project would you do first?” Fine, for sincerity’s sake: “None!”, but I don’t say that, becuase it’s not just the projects that are at play, but also the group dynamics, the conditions, the everything. And then there are goals. Which goals. And then there are constraints. Which constraints. And then there’s money. Whose money? And I say: “It’s not important what I think, what is important is what is best for us.”

There we are. Best! It doesn’t exist unless there’s context. The most money. The most money this month. The most money this year. The most money till the end of life. The fairest to participant. The fairest to participants this month. The fairest to participants for the forthcoming future. The fairest and richest, both at the same time? I mean, you get the picture and I haven’t even get started yet.

Sincerely, there’s a huge problem with the word “Best”. I leaves one on top and everyone else in the dust. That’s what our society does. It is sincere about accepting the fact that there’s one winner and everyone else losers. I, sincerely, do not accept that. To me there are no winners and losers, there are first and foremost people. Lovely people. All are lovely people. And there’s care for the people. Endless care. Sincere care. The best is for the rest.

I believe sincerity as important as other virtues. And each of them is virtuest of them all.

Especially sincerity.

And love.

Love is, well, sincere.