Fake Life?

It’s always a pleasant surprise when I hear of the moment when the fake life of someone – whether it’s a celebrity or someone within my online community, friends or schoolmate – is exposed for what it is. Of course it’s amusing, not to talk of hilarious - especially when the person’s showy character has gotten on your nerves, but my primary emotion is surprise.

I barely manage to live the one life I have without major conflicts – that is, I cannot totally avoid conflict, so I try to keep things on a low key (damage control). So how the hell does someone manage to balance two lives – two different lifestyles, personas… everything? In fact, anything beyond two is even beyond the scope of my imagination.

Of course in this I’m not referring to people who have ‘online lives’. It is extremely hard to see someone who is 100% the same in both their real lives and *Facebook lives.

*I’m just using Facebook here because that’s where you see the most catfishing and stuff like that.

I’m referring to people whom you associate with every day - you attend the same school, wok together – and the life they live at school, work or wherever is totally different from that which they lead at home. And they are very dogged and determined to continue living the ‘best of both worlds’

*Scoffs* A round of applause for Hannah Montana.

And apparently, in the world we live in, there are people who will stand up for anything. Literally anything. I mean, someone will devote his/her time to motivating people who do this, coming up with quotes like ‘Fake it till you make it!’ On behalf of psychiatrists worldwide, where is the sanity?

I once had a friend… now that I think about it, we weren’t really friends; we were just classmates. So I once had this classmate who was a really boastful guy. He told us his dad was a rich businessman who also ran a church – we all knew the church, although we didn’t know who ran it – and his mother was also a rich businesswoman who owned one of the biggest departmental stores in the town – we all knew the store, but we didn’t know who owned it.

You couldn’t really blame us for believing him; we were all in the first grade – if our parents told us they would buy us cars if we finished our vegetables, you could bet that we were eating them broccoli like our lives depended on it.

But some parts of the story really didn’t add up:

1. He always trekked to and from school. When we asked, he didn’t like coming to school with his ‘private limousine’ because he didn’t want to show off. And I thought he was being humble – in the end I was humbled by how gullible I had been.

2. He rarely had notes for his subjects because he didn’t buy books. He always said his dad was too busy in China, and was rarely around to buy him books.

I really admonish myself for this last one. Your mom owned the biggest departmental store in the town bro, how the hell did you not have BOOKS? BOOKS!

In the end, I really can’t remember how we found out, but it turned out his father was in that church – he joined the welfare program for the less-privileged! His mother dealt in petty foodstuff in the local market. I always wondered about the thinking behind his lies and fake life – which was worse? The ‘shame’ of telling everyone your parents weren’t all that rich and things weren’t easy, or the SHAME of everyone finding out that you were just lying about being the son of the richest man in Babylon when in reality, you were really from a ‘poor’ home?

There are a lot of things you need your brain for daily – and it’s an overload on the poor guy to have to recall every lie you had to tell to keep your castle firmly rooted in its foundation of thin air. And then the poor guy also has to think of new lies that correlate to the old lies so that everything lines up. If you’re going to need to lie so much to preserve a fake image, you could as well get an air mattress so you could be comfortable doing it!

The fact is that no matter how ‘bad’ things are – you owe no one any explanation. Have one life and focus on living it to the fullest, because no matter how many people you impress with those lies, you are definitely not going to have a shoulder to cry on when life comes with a wrecking ballot to scatter your little ‘Camelot’.

Good Morning!