You know everyone's a liar, right?

Just a reminder

This is just a reminder that sometimes people lie. I find it incredibly helpful to remember this as I try to square their supposed experiences with what I perceive to be true about the universe. If what they are saying doesn’t conform to my reality, I dismiss it. They lied! Keep this in mind as you move through life.

When you’re tempted to rage-spiral about some ridiculous behavior a teenager is recapping on TikTok or an Am I The Asshole post, recall: it’s mostly lies. When you think “I can’t believe people like this exist!” take comfort in the fact that most of them don’t. Here’s a guy admitting to making up fake scenarios and writing into Slate’s advice column about them.

There’s a story that circulates, in some version, every year about how someone’s friend or cousin went to Europe, ate like a glutton for a week and came home having lost weight because American food is so over-processed and the cheese in France isn’t, or something. Everyone has their own explanation: it’s the nitrates! This person probably walked more on vacation! Even truthers miss the point, positing that weight always fluctuates, and if this person had actually tracked their weight regularly, this blip wouldn’t be statistically significant.

Occam’s razor time: it didn’t happen. This simply did not occur.

It works in real life, too! I have a friend, let’s call her Jane, and she has a frenemy, let’s call her Alyssa, whom I also know a bit. Alyssa is very hot and posted a picture of herself looking hot and someone that, I guess, Alyssa cares about talking to commented asking Alyssa how she got so hot, and Alyssa responded with her workout routine. Some time after I saw this interaction online, Jane commented how it was so annoying that Alyssa could be so hot without ever working out. I said Jane, why do you think Alyssa doesn’t work out? Jane said, because she told me! And I said Jane, SHE LIED TO YOU. We both felt better.

The first (possibly only?) time I called someone out for lying, in the moment, wasn’t particularly confrontational. A college friend who was a bit of a “has a story for everything” guy was telling us how he’d stumbled into a job at a little hole in the wall tavern while studying abroad. And he was just getting so much delight out of every detail he laid out, and I’d had a drink, so I said, “no you didn’t.”

He was like, what do you mean? And I just said, I think you’re making this up. This sounds fake. This is not true.

Now, context, for my entire first year at NYU one of my favorite anecdotes to relay at parties was that my grandfather was one of the hostages in the 1979 Iran Hostage Crisis. Absolutely fake, but I didn’t tell the story for clout. I told it because I wanted to see if I could get people who hadn’t met me before to believe it, but moreover, I just thought it was funny. I wore prescription-less eyeglasses all year for the same reason. Looking back, I still think those are both funny.

Anyway, my college friend was flustered but not offended, and I dropped the bit, though I never actually said I believed him.

Parents lie to kids, celebrities lie to the public, politicians lie to each other. I make no moral argument about it — I’m just tired of everyone being so easily duped. By ads promising unlikely results, misinformation on social media, outright fucking nonsense. There is no such thing as a teacup pig!!!!

I know, I know, we believe what we want to believe. But remember, if there’s something you don’t want to believe, you don’t have to. People lie.

But also, fuck Hasan Minhaj, that’s so fucked up.

My grandfather actually WAS one of the hostages!!

Lizzie