March 16, 2025
How often do you find yourself doing something that you know is not good for you? Cheating on your spouse or slithering out of paying your taxes, while we know will land us in serious hot water (most of the time), are not exactly the types of behaviors to which I’m referring.
Do you ever lie? If some of you are appalled at being confronted with this question, then relax, take a deep breath and allow me to answer it for you: “yes”, you do. In fact, we all fabricate, embellish, underplay and deny certain facts or situations on some level and at various points in our lives.
Sometimes it’s a “necessary” fib, designed to placate or protect the fragile state of a specific individual or group; perhaps you simply don’t feel like going to work, so you feign illness; parents lie to their kids all the time (Ho, ho, humbug); and any swift moment that we tell ourselves one thing and then act against it by doing the other thing, in a way, we are lying.
Hershey’s
This is not meant to buzz kill everyone into a self-pity party. Human consciousness is insanely complicated and you are not the 4 ½ year old sitting on the floor with chocolate all over his face, whose mother is asking if he was the one who smeared Hershey’s syrup all over the place.
Side note: if you’re the actual parent in this situation, there’s no need to hold the desk lamp over their sticky little head and interrogate them until they crack or Hershey-squirt their shorts. Simply teach them the error of their ways by inviting them to help you clean up the mess and remind them which items are used for painting and which ones give you explosive diarrhea (depending on the ingredients, it might be safer to eat the paints than the syrup).
Lying is an uncomfortable subject, especially when it’s knocking at your door. But for some reason, when it’s someone else’s nightmare we don’t seem to have too much difficulty letting it right on in, where it’s just considered “spicy” dinner conversation. Some people might even be a little too comfortable discussing the indiscretions of others, which can be a sociological red flag. Sometimes it’s best to just smile and nod (or you might be next on their list).
We all know that dishonesty, cheating and stealing are wrong- additionally, the humiliating external backlash of being caught in a lie at our job, with our spouse or in a social group induces so much imaginary anxiety that most people do their best to avoid the path of dishonesty altogether and usually (we hope) take the higher, more clear path as often as possible.
The issue that we often take for granted, however, is the complicated relationship we have with ourselves. The amount of wasted, superficial energy we exude when it comes to other people’s business often seems to take precedence over our own personal demons of this particular nature, which are typically bottled up and shipped further inbound.
Have a Seat
We often don’t feel compelled or physically able to bring about change when we’re left to our own psychological devices. The internal conversations we have, the doubts, questions, fears, anxieties and excuses we speak within our heads, are often ignored or dealt with in sub-productive ways.
Sure, our pulse quickens and our synapses fire, but only just enough to engage ourselves in another distraction: i.e. food, gossip, work, alcohol, shopping, scrolling, to name a few. Meanwhile, we have chocolate sauce smeared all over our face, but nobody else can “see” it. So it’s all good, right? Eh.
Part of the reason why interventions can be so effective is because the individual of focus has to confront their misdeeds outwardly, to a group of people who care about them. It’s a very tangible and harshly realistic process, the result of inner lies that didn’t just fester in anxiety, but developed into outwardly dishonest and the subsequent pattern of harmful behaviors.
This only happens in extreme circumstances, when other people are paying attention and willing to act collectively. Interventions are much less successful when we’re conducting these meetings internally and without a supporting cast, which is ironically the very reason why people may end up in the middle of someone’s living room, surrounded by their concerned loved ones.
Pen Me
Happiness and success, some may argue, are an illusion or at least a by-product of something deeper and more meaningful occurring within oneself. Over time and with lots of practice, one can begin to head off their mistakes in a sort of pre-intervention phase of rational thought, where negative self-talk is supplanted by a more honest and constructive inner dialogue, essentially extinguishing the bullshit.
These we could colloquially define as “good habits”, but what occurs between our ears is conducted privately and the ego either dismisses its owner’s indiscretions in the interest of being “correct” or chastises our consciousness for betraying itself. We can circumvent these tendencies with deeper, more introspective modalities.
The ego is why journaling can be extremely helpful for a lot of people struggling to keep up with their thoughts and emotions. Getting it out of your system can be very liberating and much less awkward than an intervention or even a spicy cocktail party conversation.
Another way to disentangle the wires upstairs is through regular, focused breathing practices: Meditation can dissolve that pesky ego, allowing us to experience greater levity, while fostering more compassion, improve critical thinking skills and elicit more authentic perceptions of human behavior that allow us to experience a more altruistic state of being.
Doompity-Doo
The reason we often fail to learn from our mistakes is the same reason why history repeats itself: it’s the “self” that always gets in the way of progress. Our well-being seems to hinge on the expectations we create, which are illusory in nature and often confused with optimism or hope. We can’t deny that we live in a world of dishonest creatures and conglomerates, but we don’t have to be one of them. We can simply pick ourselves up by the proverbial bootstraps with the aforementioned “good habits” stowed securely in our physiological toolbox.
Be careful with, “I know I got at least a 90% on that exam, if it’s anything under that I will literally lose my shit.” We’re not great at predicting the future, even when we take the damn test ourselves. I personally try to avoid the whole “if this, then that” line of thinking with regard to outcomes or expectations and ride the wave of reality.
Sure it’s nice to be prepared, but life is also random and playing good cop, bad cop with ourselves is about as constructive as playing it with our toddler after discovering they’ve been playing Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory Fountain on our bed sheets. Have you ever tried to detain an Oompa-Loompa?
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