The Truth Is A Social Construct

Everyone is lying to you.

Here's why: we love being lied to. We prefer beautiful lies over the ugly truth. So the whole world runs on lies. You're reading this and thinking that I must be the most cynical person on earth, and that surely there are some honest truths out there. But the reality is, the truth is a social construct. What you choose to believe and who you choose to believe are all relative, and those choices are usually based on how you were raised, your own life experiences and perception of the world. 

The problem is that we've become so used to believing that we're actually fed the truth and that people would never lie to us, that now we're shocked when someone like Hasan Minhaj or Jay Shetty or Jeff Bezos turns out to have been telling "emotional truths". As if we didn't realize everyone was lying about who they are in the first place, and that is quite literally why they got to where they are. But we eat it up, because the truth isn't pretty, and that's why they keep doing it.

Think about the phrase, "everyone lies on their resume". If it's the first time you're hearing (reading) that, you've either never had a job before, never written a resume before, or just need a few more years of life experience under your belt. However, it's true! We magnify and manipulate the work we've done to make it sound incredibly impressive and sell ourselves to an employer. Those employers then magnify and manipulate the work they've done to sell their products to customers and consumers. The government lies about what they are doing, what they plan to do, and how they'll do it on a regular basis. The media lies to us about what they know about what the government is doing and what's going on all across the globe. Doctors lie to you about what the real way to heal you is, motivated and paid by pharmaceutical and medical insurance companies who lie to you to make money off of your illnesses and ailments. We lie to ourselves and everyone around us on social media and dating apps at all hours of the day. Everyone you know, yourself included, is a salesperson selling lies about who they are. We are motivated by money and the desire to be happy. I challenge you to find one person on earth who you know who has never, ever lied. I don't think it's humanly possible.

It wasn't until I joined the grotesque corporate world that I got a taste of the lie factory. As a naive twenty-something year old, I found myself at an early stage stage Silicon Valley startup, back in 2016 when tech VCs were giving money to any and everyone who knew how to put together a slide deck and had an Ivy League degree. I truly believed that I was joining a "rocketship" company (if you've been in the startup space, you know how overused this term is), and that we were going to "move fast, fix fast" our way to becoming "the next billion dollar company". If you have never heard any of those phrases before, consider yourself a lucky human being. 

I poured my heart and soul into my job -- truly believing that I was part of the next big thing. That our product was going to change the way that people do business. That I was helping connect people and make their lives better. What I had absolutely no understanding or visibility into was how little thought our CEO had put into being honest about what the product was capable of delivering, and how willing they were to bend the truth about the work being done and the "success" we were having in order to keep their board members happy and continue to receive free money.

When I left, I thought, I just made the wrong decision joining this company. No one else is doing that. There's no way. That would be so incredibly wrong and disgusting. Surely, this was just one immoral executive with too many degrees and years of experience at Google that made them extremely entitled and contorted their world view enough to justify the lies. Guess what? I was even more wrong than I thought. That CEO was one of many churned out by Silicon Valley, and, I later realized, by the corporate world for years and years and years. How could I have been so gullible?

This isn't to say that every corporate is corrupt and so we shouldn't support or consume anything and we shouldn't be a part of the corporate world. I don't believe that, and I don't think that's a healthy perception to have. The point is that the desire for money and happiness distorts people's morals and reality. It makes people hide from themselves. It makes people do things you hope they wouldn't do. It makes you do things you might not even be able to admit to yourself, let alone others, that you're doing. 

Here's the fun part: if you go through life believing that the media doesn't lie to you,  your boss doesn't lie to you, the government doesn't lie to you, your teachers don't lie to you, your parents don't lie to you, your doctors don't lie to you, your partner doesn't lie to you -- you are one of a kind. At a certain point in life, it hits you like an anvil that the whole world is lying to themselves and the world around them, just to stay afloat. 

If you've ever watched the movie, The Matrix, you understand the concept (theory?) of our entire human lives being a simulation, and that our bodies are really just batteries that fuel a bunch of giant machines of the future. What is a simulation? Per ChatGPT, it's a model or an imitation of a process, system, or situation that replicates certain aspects of reality in a controlled environment. Simulations are typically used for analysis, experimentation, or training purposes, allowing individuals to understand or predict outcomes without directly interacting with the real-world system. A simulation is, if you really think about it, a lie. 

And if you understand that, you understand why the truth is a social construct. If our whole lives are a simulation, then whatever is fed to us, whether that's by a robot or computer program or just a very powerful human being, is literally made up. I always think of that scene in the movie when Neo has been unplugged from the matrix, and Mouse tells him his theory that maybe everything tastes like chicken because the machine messed up while programming the taste for food, and it's the machine's default taste for everything. Neither they or the machines would have a way of knowing what real chicken tastes like anyway. 

Nobody really has a way to know what the truth is, since anything that happens in our lives is distorted by our personal perception of it (or whatever the machines programmed it to be). Zoom out of that concept and you'll understand why the media, government, CEOs and high level executives, celebrities, and even us little peons, are lying to ourselves and the world around us every single day. 

The thing is, I'm not telling you that everyone is lying to you so that you feel scared or sad or anxious. The goal is to wake you up. To make you think about the information you're consuming and decide what you think is right and what you want to believe in, with a healthy amount of doubt in the source it's coming from. And maybe even a reasonable doubt of the concept of truth in itself. Every day, you make a choice about what to believe, who to believe, and even what to think. You get lied to by thoughts your own brain produces, but you choose which thoughts to believe. If you believe you need to lie to make money, you will lie. And you might even make money. If you believe you are worthless and incapable of happiness, you will be. Our lies destroy us, and yet, in today's society (perhaps it's always been this way), we lie to survive.

Growing up, we're taught that lying is immoral. When you grow up, you realize that lying is unavoidable. Nobody owes you anything. Nobody is coming to save you. And that's the truth.