Liar! Liar! Pants on Fire!

Why do we lie to one another? We need to.

This Pen is indeed... BLUE!

On Sunday, we had a discussion on honesty and deception. Unsurprisingly, we all agreed that lying is necessary, and telling the truth may not always result in good. To clarify, we obviously meant white lies or funny little fibs. What do you tell a friend who invited you to a party that you dislike? What do you say when your partner's new haircut doesn't look good? How CAN you respond to your mom's cooking?😅

Everyone lies, and some on a daily basis. We come up with various reasons/excuses to justify the means, such as "the truth hurts", "to save face", "to protect someone's self-esteem", and so on. Some may say that lying is a strategic way to keep business running. For some of us, we WANT to live in a lie. However, no matter the causes, can we really feel alright after telling lies?

Lying is an addiction. It all started from trivia, and eventually if you were given enough authority, a catastrophe. We actually self-taught it because lying is an easy and quick solution to most situations, although temporary. The irony is, while the world has constantly tried to educate us on honesty, we actually learn the opposite. It also evolves. As the saying goes, the truth not just hurts, sometimes it kills. Some secrets are too big to be revealed. Therefore, even the most righteous among us would face the dilemma, and most of us are not.

Knowing can be devastating, yet liberating. From toddlers, students, couples, parents... all the way to the top, intuitively we tend to try avoiding the truth because it usually isn't to our advantage. The process of knowing the unknown is similar to that of going into a jungle. We are deeply afraid of the dark, of death for the same reason we lie about it by making stories, and movies about it. All is to prepare for the unknown. The truth... the truth is that we don't lie to avoid being hurt. We merely postpone the pain. No one disagrees with the importance of honesty. We only argue for the gray zone to lie.

Like it or not, we live in a world that wants lies, but back to the topic, what good and bad can honesty bring? They say it's "the best policy" but even that is subject to be discussed. Should we teach children how to be honest or how to tell a better lie? We ask them to be truthful and yet at the same time, "read the room" implying that honestly is just like deception, a choice, two sides of the same coin. We need both, and the lesson is to learn how and when to exercise them to the benefit of the ones we love.

( We focused more on being honest or inconsiderate on Sunday instead of something this serious.)

#selfreflect