The Most Important Person You Lie To Is Yourself

Picture hiring someone and then refusing to tell them anything about how your business actually runs. They ask reasonable questions and you feed them wrong answers. When they catch you in it and say so, you flat out deny it. What could that person possibly be good for? Maybe a scapegoat when things fall apart. You certainly wouldn't hand them a real decision. They have no idea what's going on.

We do this all the time to protect our pride and to keep fear and anxiety at a distance, except the employee being kept in the dark is us. You don't know what's going on in your own life because you've arranged not to. Refusing to see a thing doesn't remove it. Think of the elephant in the room in an alcoholic family: no one will say out loud that they notice it, and yet it stands there the whole time.

Denial lets us dodge thinking about the consequences of what we're doing to ourselves. Part of why it's so tempting is the payoff arrives right away whenever someone buys it. The quiet hope is that while we talk other people into believing us, we'll talk ourselves into it too, and the outcome we're afraid of will somehow turn out differently. Sir Walter Scott had it right: oh, what tangled webs we weave when first we practice to deceive.

The lies we tell ourselves behave exactly like the ones we tell everyone else. Sooner or later you can't track who was told what, and that includes the versions you fed yourself. Then come the consequences nobody planned on. When they land, we're genuinely stunned and ask, why me? Yes, you. You set the whole chain in motion trying to shrink something big or inflate something small, and it swelled into something you can't manage. Some people prefer to file it under self-deception, as if that made it something other than lying.