YOU EMBELLISH STORIES TO MAKE YOURSELF SOUND COOL
I’m onto you.
Did you and Tom really score courtside seats at the game? Or were you like four rows back? Don’t make me dig up the video online, you fucker.
Did you really work until 9PM last night? Or did you get home at like 8:30 and by the time you changed clothes and jerked off, it was 9?
Did you really have a coke-fueled orgy with 12 hookers? Or was it more like seven? Yeah, I figured… it was seven hookers.
Something tells me he's exaggerating.
Something tells me he’s exaggerating.
One fascinating thing about human nature is that lying has much less to do with virtue and more to do with our sense that we can get away with the lie. Humans lie when they feel as though the advantages of it outweigh the potential risk of being caught.1
This is why few of us tell big whopping lies, but pretty much all of us fib here and there by nudging the details a little bit on our stories. Two cops tackling our drunk buddy last Friday becomes four cops. Texting our ex, “Leave me alone,” magically morphs into an epic, “Go fuck yourself,” when we recount it to our friends.
Why do we do this? Because we all have this undying need to be loved and respected and admired. And if smudging the lines on our cool story can up our bad-ass-ity by 2-3% and there’s no way anyone could find out, then we just kind of automatically do it.
The problem arises when this becomes a chronic habit, and those “little smudges” become big smears. All of the classic issues with lying apply here: social embarrassment, reinforcing one’s shame and feeling that one is not good enough, a desperate desire to please and impress those around us, and just being an annoying try-hard.
Cut it out. Chances are you won’t ever be able to completely stop lying (for no other reason than our memories are awful, as well), but do your best to reign it in.