Mostly, I tell the truth in real time. The lies I tell tend to be in the realm of goals and predictions. Here is a selection of my latest.
- For 90 Posts in 90 Days, I said I wouldn’t write posts in advance. FACT: I’m writing this one as I think of the lies. Addendum: I started this post on 3/16/15, and today is 4/8/15, but I only wrote the first paragraph and the first two bullet points.
- At the New Year, I made a list of My Top 5 Subscriptions for 2015. FACT: 3 months later, I’m only subscribed to 2 of the original list, and I’ve signed up for a bunch more, keeping some and deleting others after I get the free information I signed up for which I may or may not have read which is why I was trying to limit myself in the first place. Some of the people I’ve been paying attention to in 2015 include Melanie Cobb, Tad Hargrave, Tara Gentile, Carol Donahoe, and Karen Rosenzweig. And these are just the people I’ve paid for their ideas.
- I swore off my three favorite drugs. FACT: I have forsworn that foreswearing, or, as my college drinking buddies used to say, “I gave up drinking, and then I gave that up.” My initial reasoning was that if I’m going to write every day, I don’t want to create any excuses for not getting the writing done, like, “I’m sooooooo hungover, I think I’ll skip writing today.” Or, since that condition is pretty rare for me these days, “I’m sick because I haven’t been careful about what I put in my body and how much sleep I’m getting and I don’t need to sleep because I can always substitute caffeine for a good night of restful dreams and then use one of my favorite depressants to help me fall asleep because I drank a pot of coffee to wake up this morning…” — well, I think you an see where I was going with that. The truth is, moderation in all things including moderation makes my life worth living, and I’m choosing my debauchery more consciously than ever.
There are other untruths I could cop to, but most of those fall in the realm of dream versus reality, or big idea that goes undeveloped, or apparent hypocrisy which turns out to be human fallibility combined with idealism (or maybe the other way around).
In any case, all human beings are liars, and that’s why I love us so much.
What have you lied about recently?