We recently conducted qualitative research by crowd-sourcing over 100 open-ended responses to the question:

“What signs do you look for that help you identify people who are likely to be untrustworthy or who are likely to hurt you if they become your close friend or partner?”

We thought the answers contained some insights that may help you to identify people with whom it would be risky to get too close. 

Here is a summary of the common themes that our respondents suggested as potential red flags or warning signs for an untrustworthy or harmful person:

1. Manipulation: This takes many forms, including guilt trips, gaslighting, peer pressure, negging, emotional blackmail, and a variety of more subtle behaviors, such as when someone is excessively nice early in a relationship in a way that is not congruent with their underlying personality. These are attempts to control or influence others without being straightforwardly coercive and without appealing to rational persuasion.

2. Inconsistency and Dishonesty: This includes inconsistencies in narratives they tell and dishonesty, but also more subtle forms of deception (such as repeated small untruths and inconsistencies between words and actions) or a lack of continuity in self-presentation over time. This can also include describing projects, connections, or behaviors in grandiose ways that are detached from reality. 

3. Self-Centeredness: This includes a lack of awareness or care regarding the impact of their actions on others, with a focus just on how situations impact themselves. This self-centeredness can also appear as an over-concern with outward appearances (or how situations make them look), frequent bragging, an excessive focus on seeking attention, and the tendency to only talk about themselves without inquiring about others.

4. Anger: Everyone experiences anger sometimes, but frequent, uncontrolled, or unexpected anger tends to be seen as a red flag. Similarly, approval of vengeful or vindictive behavior (or engagement in these behaviors) can be problematic.

5. Lack of Empathy: A lack of empathy for the suffering of others or an absence of kindness in words or actions can signal that someone is more likely to harm you if you become close friends with them or enter into a relationship with them. 

6. Extreme Emotionality: This refers to emotional instability or extreme mood swings. It is even more problematic when accompanied by blaming others for their emotional reactions, especially when those reactions are highly inappropriate (given the circumstances). Extreme emotional reasoning can cause people to become detached from reality (e.g., “Since I feel angry, you must have seriously wronged me!” or “Since I feel anxious, you must be threatening me!”).

7. Avoidance and Poor Communication: It can be difficult to be close to someone who is extremely avoidant of conflict, who hides intense negative feelings that they experience (e.g., pretending not to be angry when they are furious), or who has poor communication skills, especially when resolving issues or conflicts.

8. Lack of Responsibility and Accountability: This includes impulsivity, recklessness, a lack of consideration for others’ safety, an inability to take responsibility after making mistakes, failing to follow through on commitments, or blaming others for their own shortcomings. This can also include serious addiction issues that they are not seeking treatment for, constantly identifying as a victim of their circumstances while not taking responsibility for their role, and projecting personal issues onto others (or lacking self-awareness of their serious faults).

9. Poor Handling of Their Other Relationships: It can be offputting if someone seems unable to healthily handle other relationships in their life or if they treat people poorly if they disagree with or dislike them. Other behaviors, such as asking to borrow money from someone early in a relationship with them, may reflect a lack of common sense or a general inability to navigate relationships in a healthy way.

10. Negative Talk and Gossip: It does not bode well when someone often speaks negatively of others, especially as a source of entertainment or habitual gossiping. This can include talking badly about past associates or partners, such as saying that all their exes were “crazy.”

11. Judgmentalness: Signs of judgmentalness could include passing harsh negative judgments of others based on little information or being very critical or judgmental of other people’s minor faults.

Please note that these traits and behaviors are a summary of over 100 people’s views, not our personal opinions and not professional advice. If you’re concerned that you might be in an abusive relationship, we strongly encourage you to seek support. Seeking help is a brave and important step toward ensuring your safety and well-being. Remember, you’re not alone, and there are resources and people ready to assist you. 

If you are in a relationship that you want to improve, we have a few free tools that might help:

1. Kind And Effective Communication (15 Minutes): Learn and practice principles of non-violent communication to build stronger relationships, resolve conflicts, and improve your self-understanding and awareness.
2. The Relationship Review (15 Minutes): Examine different aspects of your relationship with a partner, close friend, or family member using an open, non-judgmental approach
3. Managing Arguments In A Relationship (20 Minutes): Learn how to navigate arguments effectively and kindly using a situation of your choosing.

Having social interactions and spending time with a variety of kind people is an essential part of our general well-being, but this can become counterproductive when your interactions are with people who are untrustworthy or who aim to harm you.

We hope this “wisdom of the crowds” summary helps you to identify some of the warning signs of unsafe people!

This first appeared on Clearer Thinking on November 3, 2023, and first appeared on this site on November 8, 2023.

Healthy vs. Unhealthy Emotional Validation 

I would say that the main difference between the healthy validation of emotions and the unhealthy version is that the healthy version is based on genuine compassion, caring, authenticity, honesty, and interest in the other person’s experience, whereas the unhealthy version involves a willingness to sacrifice those things in an attempt to make the other person immediately feel good.

At a more detailed level, I think the healthy way to validate other people’s feelings involves expressing the following ideas (but ONLY when these ideas are true).

Healthy Emotional Validation

1) Care: I care about you.

2) Willingness: I’m totally okay with you feeling this emotion right now in front of me.

3) Acceptance: I don’t think badly of you for feeling what you’re feeling.

4) Interest: I am interested in learning more about what you are feeling and why you are feeling it.

5) Compassion: I have compassion and/or empathy for your suffering and want you not to suffer (unless you want to suffer right now, in which case I want you to suffer only insofar and in the ways that seem appropriate to you, such as the suffering that most people feel is right to feel after the loss of a loved one).

6) Understanding of facts: I understand the facts of what happened in this situation (and if I don’t, I’m going to ask open-ended questions in an effort to understand it).

7) Understanding of feelings: I understand why you’re feeling this way (and if I don’t, I’m going to make an effort to understand it).

8) Legitimization of feelings: I think it is totally reasonable that this combination of your situation, your beliefs about this situation, your thoughts, and your past experiences causes you to feel this way right now (and if I don’t see how the combination of your situation, beliefs, etc., lead to your emotion, I’m going to make an effort to understand it).

While some of this is helpful to say aloud when a friend or loved one is upset, much of it will typically be expressed through body language, attention, attitude, presence, tone of voice, and so on. The main thing is that these ideas get expressed in a way that the other person receives them, whether that expression is verbal or non-verbal, explicit or implicit.

On the other hand, I think that it’s usually unhealthy to attempt to validate emotions when it’s done expressing the following ideas.

Unhealthy Emotional Validation 

1) Disingenuousness: you say things that you don’t really mean or believe, such as supporting their claims about what happened when you don’t believe those claims are true.

2) Emotional reasoning: you support the idea that whatever their emotional response is to the situation is a perfect guide to what actually occurred (e.g., if they feel angry at someone, that implies the other person must have done something objectively harmful, or if they feel they’ve lost someone they had a fight with, that means that person is gone forever).

3) Justification: you support or encourage harmful or self-destructive actions they took or are considering taking as a consequence of their negative feelings (e.g., normalizing them taking revenge on the person they are angry about or justifying why it is okay that they did so).

4) Absolving: you encourage the idea that they made no mistakes or behaved perfectly or that someone else is 100% to blame for the situation (unless, of course, you really believe this to be true). On this point, it is often the case that victims of crimes did nothing at all wrong, but this is much less commonly the case when it comes to, for instance, interpersonal conflict between romantic partners, which usually involves both parties having behaved imperfectly, though not necessarily to the same degree.

To recap, people often want emotional validation from their friends and loved ones when they are feeling upset. People are often confused, though, about what this means exactly. There are both healthy ways and unhealthy ways to do emotional validation. 

The healthy version is not always easy to do, but I think it is what we should aspire to when a friend or loved one wants emotional validation. 

To do the healthy version, aim to imbue your responses to their emotions with genuine compassion, caring, authenticity, honesty, and interest in their experiences. And avoid sacrificing those things just to make the other person feel good.

This piece was first written on October 1, 2023, and first appeared on this site on October 11, 2023.

1. Autonomy

Pro: you’re the boss and decide what to do.

Con: you HAVE to always decide what to do. There will be a huge array of options at any given moment, and you’ll never know for sure which to work on. You can seek advice, but ultimately YOU are the one who must decide.

2. Lifestyle

Pro: since you’re the boss, you’ll have flexibility in your hours.

Cons: you’ll inevitably be working a lot of hours. It takes a lot of work to succeed as an entrepreneur. Since there is never an end to how much work can be done, you may have trouble “turning off” at the end of the day or on the weekend.

3. Resilience

Pro: it’s an incredible way to train resilience, persistence, and problem-solving skills.

Con: the world will punch you in the face between 5 and 100 times, and if you ever give up, you lose. This is stressful, and most humans would give up after 5 or 10 face punches.

4. Expected Value

Pro: if you’re well suited to it and work on a good idea, the expected (mean) value in terms of potential impact and monetary reward can be REALLY high. Some companies have truly altered the course of history. And obviously, many of the wealthiest people are entrepreneurs.

Con: the probability of failure is high, and luck is a significant factor. And unless you have substantial savings, you’ll likely be living frugally at first.

5. Learning

Pro: you will learn a tremendous amount. Even if the startup doesn’t work out, this valuable experience will apply to MANY other things. I don’t know of another way to learn so many things so quickly. One of the most important categories of things you’ll learn is “how to get difficult shit done in the real world while charting a path yourself for how to make it happen.”

Con: you will inevitably make many mistakes (ouch), and you have to face up to them (double ouch) in order to learn fast enough. It forces you to acknowledge and improve (or develop workarounds for) your weaknesses. It’s also important to note that if you are really not suited for entrepreneurship, or you just get unlucky right away, you might not learn that much. The great learning from entrepreneurship certainly doesn’t require success, but if you fail too immediately or don’t get anywhere close to success, it will be much less of a learning experience.

6. Meaning

Pro: you can choose to work on an idea that is DEEPLY meaningful to you. Most jobs don’t provide this level of meaning.

Con: if you fail, you will have invested a lot of time in (and then failed at) something deeply meaningful to you.

7. Respect

Pro: many people have a lot of respect for entrepreneurs, and it’s considered cool in plenty of circles.

Con: this respect increasingly kicks in as success increases, and before that, some people won’t even respect it as a career choice. If you fail, that will still garner respect from some people, but most people probably won’t give you much respect for having tried and failed.

8. Relationships

Pro: you will likely meet lots of interesting people and build meaningful relationships with your team members.

Cons: you may have to deal with difficult personalities or navigate complex human dynamics when it comes to employees, investors, customers, and/or co-founders.

9. Responsibility

Pro: it teaches you a deep form of responsibility, which strengthens your character.

Con: you are ultimately, at the end of the day, responsible for everything. You’re the captain, the last line of defense, and the goalie. When someone else at your company screws up, and it ends up having a bad effect on the business, as unfair as it may seem, it’s actually your fault. You hired them, or didn’t put safety measures in place, or didn’t spot the problem early enough, or didn’t give them the training they needed, etc. The captain is responsible for the fate of the ship and every crew member on it.

10. Adaptability

Pro: it hones your creativity and adaptability, can really build self-confidence, and can help you develop a sense of how much you’re capable of (probably more than you think!) as you figure out solutions for complex challenges, develop new ideas, and map out how to make them a reality. It pushes your boundaries in new ways and makes you grow.

Con: it can stretch your creativity and adaptability to the limit. Plans, essential as they are to make, rarely survive their collision with reality. It sometimes pushes your boundaries more than you would like and can place you into situations that you find terrifying (e.g., a high-stakes negotiation to save your company when it is on the brink of failure, or a major technical failure that leaves hundreds of customers furious at you, etc.).

So, why NOT be an entrepreneur? Because it’s a high-risk, chaotic, stressful, responsibility-filled, boundary-pushing, challenging life. And it’s hard work. Not everyone is suited to this path, and it’s irresponsible to pretend that everyone is.

BUT, if you’re well suited for it, it can be one of the most deeply meaningful, high-value, high-impact lives to lead. You’ll meet lots of people, build resilience and adaptability, push your skills to new heights, and learn a STAGGERING amount. For some people, it is absolutely their best life path.

If you think that entrepreneurship may be the right path for you, and you haven’t yet picked what idea to work on, you may be interested in learning more about our work at Spark Wave. We’re a startup studio (venture builder), and we recruit people who are interested in becoming CEOs for our mission-driven software products (no technical background or prior startup experience is required). We aim to reduce some of the worst negatives of entrepreneurship while building products that we believe could add a lot of value to the world. Our goal is to help make a better world through software and entrepreneurship. You can learn more and get in touch with us at: https://www.sparkwave.tech

This piece was first written on September 3, 2020, and first appeared on this site on July 29, 2022.

How big does P need to be before it’s irresponsible to say, “Well, the horrible event is unlikely to happen, so let’s not worry about it”?

50% (1 in 2)?
5% (1 in 20)?
1% (1 in 100)?
0.1% (1 in 1,000)?
0.01%? (1 in 10,000)?
0.001%? (1 in 100,000)?
0.0001%? (1 in 1,000,000)?

To me, it seems bizarre to dismiss a threat that has even a 1 in 1000 chance of causing the worst events in human history (over the next 50 years) with an argument like “I think it’s unlikely to happen; therefore, let’s stop worrying about it.” Most people (quite rationally) decide it’s worth wearing a seatbelt with each drive, despite far less than a 1 in 1000 chance of a car accident on each trip. Yet, as a society, we often collectively go without our metaphorical seatbelts when it comes to societal risks. And with societal risks, unlike with seatbelts, we often can’t even really say what the probability of these risks is – some people have an intuition that they are very small, but many others believe the risk is high.
 
Of course, preparing for risks doesn’t mean we should stop everything else in the meantime; it just means that we should take collective action to reduce these risks as long as the cost per unit of risk reduction is not too high. And yet, we often fail to do so.

There are a number of activities humanity is doing right now that one could reasonably argue have a P of at least 1 in 1000 and perhaps much higher than that. For instance:

Our lack of strong controls on pathogen research enables the potential creation of engineered viruses or bacteria that could lead to terrible pandemics.

Our lack of safeguards on AI development leaves open the possibility of super-intelligent AI that we are unable to control or super-intelligent AI that gives one group unreasonable levels of power.

Our failure to create global coordination around climate change leaves open the possibility of catastrophic climate impacts.

The most popular argument given for ignoring these potential risks is that they seem (to the person who advocates ignoring them) unlikely to happen. While many disagree that these are unlikely, even if they are unlikely, they’d have to be really unlikely with a high degree of confidence for that to be sufficient grounds for not taking significant precautions.

This piece was first written on August 1, 2017, and first appeared on my website on June 11, 2025.