Lying

I am not going to say that you should not lie to people. Nowadays, it is really hard not to. Or worse, not lying may actually make your life harder, but I am not going into the ethics of lying. As a matter of fact, it is totally subjective, and depends on one’s own beliefs, life and expectations from themselves. It is up to you whether you lie or not, or when to lie and when not to. If you ask me, I am trying to have a strong rule for myself to not lie to people I trust, love and care about. For each other scenario - it depends, and it’s just my own belief and subjective view that dictates how I am going to behave in that given situation. Importantly, I am not intending to make others act in that way.

However, I believe there is one thing that everybody should practice when it comes to lying. I am a humble believer that we should not lie to ourselves. I am aware that this rule might not make any sense if you never truly reflected on yourself.

We are our own besties

We are our own true friends. Nobody else can understand us more than ourselves; nobody would be able to experience the world through our eyes; nobody ever lived any part of our life as ourselves; nobody really knows what it is like to be us. Don’t get me wrong: family, friends or significant others can become empathetic at times. However, it’s not right to expect them to truly understand us. They just can’t! Nor you them! You haven’t lived anyone else’s life, nor have they lived yours. Really understanding someone requires truly living the exact same life from birth up to any given point, under the exact same circumstances. But I know who has gone through it all. It’s YOU! You have gone through all the ups and downs of your life. You have experienced all the happy and sad moments of your life first hand. Who’s better to understand you than your own self?

So, if we have only one truly understanding friend, why would we deceive them, why would we want to lie to them, why would we keep them in the dark, why be dishonest with them? It does not make any sense. It literally has net negative effect on our life. We don’t gain any advantages like we would do by lying to others in certain real-life situations. The most we can get is perhaps a temporary satisfaction, but I am sure the feeling will be gone immediately and you will start to feel a weird kind of emptiness inside yourself - a feeling that you cannot label. You wouldn’t be able to identify why you feel like that with literally no reason to do so.

Yet we fail ourselves from time and time. We lie to ourselves. And we convince ourselves to believe our own lies. It’s the same as closing your eyes and saying that you’re invisible. Sure, you may become invisible if there’s nobody around to see you (what’s “being invisible” anyways?). However, when someone knocks on the door and enters the room, you would no longer be invisible, unless you have already convinced yourself that you are. In this case, they will try to convince you that you are in fact visible, but you may continue to believe that they are lying to you. The more you continue, the more you will feel the outside pressure. Except, when we lie to ourselves, that pressure comes from within and without any clear reason. As we have already believed in our own lies, it’s really hard to dig down and unravel what’s really haunting us.

It’s not about advice

Do you know why talking to others helps us? Not because they are listening; in fact most of the time, people are thinking of something else while you are talking to them. Listening is really a hard task at hand, but it’s not what we care about here. It works because we give ourselves a chance to be true to ourselves; it’s because we get a chance to reflect and to truly open up to ourselves. From the outside it may seem like we open up to others, but in reality we do it to ourselves. Others are just a mirror that we can look at while doing so. We stop telling lies because when we open up, we usually do it to people we care about. And we don’t want to lie to them. Therefore, we get a chance and a purpose to be truly open with ourselves.

That’s also why, when having an intimate conversation, the talking party usually doesn’t like it when the listener interrupts them by giving advice or for any other reason. Surely, it depends on a case-by-case basis. However, I can assure you, in more than half of the cases people do just want someone to be a mirror so they can be true to themselves - they don’t want your advice, or worse, they don’t want you to shift the conversation to yourself¹. They want you to just be there and truthfully listen. Just listen and let them unravel their thoughts to themselves. Just be there and give them a chance to become honest. They already know the answers: it’s just that they are buried deep down and require a bit of effort to be grasped.

This is also the reason why journalling works. It gives us a chance to be intimate with ourselves. We force ourselves to delve deeper into thoughts and avoid lies if possible. When journalling, we allow ourselves to become all vulnerable and write down our thoughts without worrying about the consequences. All it matters is that we give ourselves a chance to be honest. It’s all about self reflection and telling the truth. If done correctly, it feels like bliss. You will not solve your problems but at least you will know what they are. The next step will be to work on said issues, or just wait if it’s something that time can heal.

That’s all I got to say. Have a wonderful life, dear reader! ☺️