I used to lie a lot as a kid. I’m not proud of it and I don’t want to defend or justify it. It just seemed so easy to do. You could lie to get out of trouble. You could lie to impress people. Lying seemed to be a harmless thing that led to better outcomes. I didn’t feel bad about lying to my friends and loved ones. I think I probably had some boundaries – which now seem embarrassing and shameful to think about – like I wouldn’t make up hurtful things, or I wouldn’t lie to get someone else in trouble, that sort of thing. I would lie about my homework. There were white lies, like lying to make someone feel better, and there were grey-area lies, maybe.
A phrase that I remember some elders saying was something like – with regards to cheating in a test, for example – was “you are only cheating yourself”. I didn’t understand why that was a problem at all! Ha, I wrote a whole wordvomit about this back in 2014: 0192 – “you’re only cheating yourself”. I think part of my frustration with that utterance is that, typically, whoever was saying was probably using it to disguise the fact that they are personally frustrated and disappointed with the person that they’re chiding. I’m trying to think now if my ex-boss ever used that phrase with me. I feel like it’s possible that he might have, but if he did, the vibe would’ve been totally different. And the vibe matters so much. By vibe here I mean… the implicit connotations, the tone of voice. Most people say it like it’s a moral failure on the part of the cheater. But in my conversations with my ex-boss, he helped me see how it’s not just a moral failure but also, almost more interestingly, bad strategy.
I got into this in 0192 – that we have multiple sub-selves, and when we cheat ourselves, it’s usually the more selfish, narrow-minded parts of ourselves cheating the more open, free, enlightened parts of ourselves. We damage our own credibility with ourselves. This is the problem of being a liar, that wasn’t obvious to me as a child. When you become a person who tells lies regularly, intentionally or otherwise, you start to create this divergence between your utterances and reality. To get more precise about it, it’s very difficult for anybody to ever have a really good, clear picture of what reality is like. The map is not the territory, and we can never really fully understand the territory, and it’s harder still to communicate our understanding to others – even if the understanding is a good one!
And communication is difficult even when you’re simply communicating with yourself, trying to understand what is going on inside your own head, what is the truth of your own experience. One of the interesting things that is mentioned in The Body Keeps The Score is how people who survive trauma and abuse often come up with “cover stories” to explain things to themselves and others, and these cover stories – they’re lies, if we’re being harsh about it – rarely capture the full truth of the experience. It might seem true enough, but it’s usually missing some critical detail, some important element, and as long as that truth is not acknowledged, there’s something “off” about the whole thing. This is strange to think about because if you really get into it you start seeing how everything is subjective, everything is representations, you could get to ideas like “nothing is real”.
But even if “nothing is real” in that sort of abstract sense, some things are relatively more real than others. Some models of reality correspond to reality better than others. Some cover stories are more honest than others.
There’s a great bit from Ray Dalio in his book Principles where he says, “I learned that failure is by and large due to not accepting and successfully dealing with the realities of life, and that achieving success is simply a matter of accepting and successfully dealing with all my realities.”
This is less straightforward and trivial than it sounds, because facing reality can be painful and uncomfortable. Looking back on my life, and looking at this project too, I think I started this project in part because I wanted to make a commitment to face the realities of my life. And looking back I can see instances in which I refused to see it. I used to be in denial of the fact that I was chronically anxious and stressed as a teenager, because I didn’t like the idea of that. And now I can see that, as long as I wasn’t honest with myself about my anxiety, there was no way that I was going to address it. And if I wasn’t going to address it, then I was going to be stuck dealing with the downstream consequences.
Jung had a quote: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
It’s interesting, I’m realising as I write this that I have some parallels with say, the chubby kid who decided to get fit – and once you go from slightly pudgy and overweight to moderately lean and fit, it’s fairly trivial to just keep going, and then end up being really fit and ripped, like a professional athlete. Similarly, I used to lie to myself and be dishonest with myself about some things, and that troubled me, and I set out to correct that – and once you set out on that journey, it seems fairly trivial to then just… keep going.
I would remix Jung’s quote in this context and say that the unconscious is full of truths that we don’t want to face, don’t like to face. And it might not even be things that we have considered and then decided to lie about. It could be that we have anger and grief and sadness buried deep down below the surface, and we can’t be honest about ourselves about this because we don’t even know. How do you be honest with yourself about things that you don’t even really know about yourself? You see how starting with a simple premise is something that can lead you on a heckuva journey. And along the way you almost have no choice but to develop a genuine intellectual humility, because you come up face to face with the fact that there are things you cannot entirely be honest about, because you cannot even entirely know the truth. But the saving grace is this: we can be honest about that. We can be honest that what we think is just that, what we think. And that everything is subject to revision, and that nothing has to be the last word on anything.