[1128] Save A Lot

I'm extremely tired. There might be a palpable level of incoherence.

Why should the truth matter?

I've written, no doubt, tens of thousands of words defending what I don't observe to be a prima facie obvious answer. The cultural instinct is to challenge the word "obvious," and immediately seek to make the discussion abstract or obscure. It doesn't matter how many practically applicable circumstances we ground the discussion in, the drive is to fundamentally suppress the truth.

Quick examples. The whole of law requires you to swear to tell the truth upon penalties of perjury. Journalists and whistleblowers are routinely killed for revealing often "boring" or "matter-of-fact" information about the corrupt systems within which they reside. There's no more familiar and tolerated root-for-the-victim scenario than when someone cheats in their relationship; entire networks have been built on the back of watching people weaponize and dance upon hearing the test results. The consequences of not having money for a necessities are immediately felt.

If you can say nothing else about the truth, it's that in its immediate expression, we believe it's going to be painful. Therefore, it has to be buttressed against something in order to maintain or measure our confidence that it exists altogether.

Are you willing to go to jail or be fined for, importantly, getting caught lying? For many people, yes, so good luck keeping that as your sole metric or practice for eliciting the desired truth. Are you willing to die to expose the nature of your government or corporation? For most people? Fuck no, and the ones that do often see their effort paid lip service to with no consequences. I can tell you as a literal counselor that functionally nobody is seriously examining the nature of their romantic attachments, as the second they do it's akin to inviting Jerry Springer into their living room.

These examples, more specifically in their celebrated failings, are what we train our expectations on. The truth comes with externally imposed punishment, is ignored, or is exploited. Where does the truth exist, if it does so at all in these scenarios? Or stated another way, what can be said that's most true, or least wrong, about them? Here we beg the contribution of emotions. Here we're introduced to the concept of "emotional truths" that are used explicitly to justify, obscure, denounce, or exploit the truth.

The truth, without quotes, includes and incorporates the feedback and consequences of emotions, without supercharging them. You can understand intuitively why someone would lie on a witness stand, cover up the money or weapons they steal, and pretend you are or aren't the father. You can matter-of-factly state that for any given conscious individual from now unto the rest of existence, those behaviors are immoral, unjust, and reliant upon dodging the many damning truths associated with that behavior. You can easily understand the benefits; monetarily, socially, and psychologically of suppressing the world that otherwise deliberately attempts to account for the consequences.

But we're only at the first level of abstraction. These are the most obvious and easy to understand scenarios. One might even try to argue for forgiveness and leniency for dipping into unhealthy behavioral places when it comes to matters needing court intervention or implicating the most powerful and resource-ridden people on the planet. It gets more subtle and dramatically worse.

We formalize and institutionalize lying. We build it into our concepts of connection, health, doing business, getting educated, and being entertained. We bake so many lies into the patterns our brains adopt, it is all-but literally impossible to maintain an eye or ear for what's actually true. If you're not formally instructed in logic or scientifically rigorous or habitually breaking apart your language and behavior and attempting to reassemble them in service to reliably repeatable pieces, you're at sea. You are at the mercy of the waves, weather, and floating device you may or may not conceive of as a seaworthy vessel.

Of course, here "emotional truth," with ingrained fluidity, does the heavy lifting to sweep in and deny the desperate truth of your circumstances. You don't feel adrift. In fact, you have an amazing story of not just the family you have, money you've made, planned vacation, hobbies and friends, but you're also deeply passionate and informed about the things someone of your cast and capacity should be.

Be on the lookout, because that's the pattern. Invariably, my clients lead with the, "It's embarrassing and confusing why I'm even here" story. They tell me all the good things they have going for them. They land on repeated choice cliches they've adopted, unconsciously, as justifying tools that obstruct the ability to fully account and otherwise infinitely impede the capacity to change.

Your feelings are the foundational lie. You don't allow yourself to accept them, and the truth of how powerfully they influence your thoughts and behavior. As a result, you build mega-structures of insecure pride.

I get exhausted by religious apologists for this reason. A 60 Minutes interviewer ass-kissing the Pope really honed in the feeling recently. It's emotionally gratifying for your modern cosplaying Catholic to celebrate the extremely moderate dance he's engaged with regard to homosexuality and bare-minimum response to fucking children.

I recognize when I'm tempted to make similar moves in my own life. The lazier I feel, I try to remind myself of how much I've accomplished and how I'm living within many of the desired goals and parameters I set out to achieve. The truth is that no matter what I accomplish, the second I dismiss or downplay my need to develop larger and even-more needing of accounting goals, I'm suffering sea sickness. If I lose sight of how much I'm explicitly not trying to be "happy" or "comfortable," I'm not "Nick P." anymore. I'm an antagonist. I'm an experimenter. I'm a creative. I'm explicitly and habitually attempting to consciously repudiate that which I find is fucking with me.

The truth hurts because it has to. You can't maintain healthy muscles if you're unwilling to feel them sore. You can't train your ability to register and respond to emotions if you don't entertain how they induce your crazy-making instincts. At bottom, you are no better than a wild animal that lashes out in predictably wild ways. We smugly joke about lion's eating faces while dismissing the smell of constantly shitting on our own rugs. It's all reliably animal all the way down.

I consider myself a considerably better-than-average truth teller solely because I do this. I look for understanding and to organize something I only had a tired and discombobulated notion of. I emotionally detach and release myself from the obligation to protect myself from any emotional response the exploration brings up. I can speak in a measured way about ongoing sources of misery, loci of failure, and dare myself to respond proactively to an otherwise endless bemoaning of circumstances. I'm both willing and excited to discuss and describe every single facet of my relationships and behavior in the most damning and forgiving terms.

The truth is the fluid complicated mix of both stories. Incorporating and resolving the learned behavior to emotionally placate instead of doing the work to form accountable narratives is the best place any one of us can arrive. Perfect is off the table. "Your truth" and "my truth" get ridiculed as the unearned faith-claims they are. The real nature of the pain and harm of floating along on a precariously placed raft of presumptions becomes strikingly clear. It will hit you as violently as the cuffs around your wrist, the pregnancy test results, or the fist of your "true love" who may control whether you live or die.

And what is touted as the most noble thing any one of us could do but to die for what we believe in? We pretend a mother fucker that comes back to life is a proper sacrifice! We pretend suicide bombers and your average everyday ideologue doesn't believe what they ritualize and chant! Sometimes I think we apologize for the faithful because we're jealous we can't be so irrationally convicted. You feel obligated to justify, infinitely, everything we kill within ourselves to protect the loudest and comfortably familiar lies.

If you don't, do you still have friends and family? Are the bills getting paid? Are you staying alive to any degree someone would desire to be so?

You are obligated, every minute of every day, to lie. To practice the party lines and be practical. To protect the familiar and those vulnerable to the dangerous and nasty suggestions from people like me to pull back and watch closer, or pull out altogether. You can't leave an environment you can't conceptualize. You can't consciously and deliberately change circumstances you don't recognize as both fluidly probabilistic and perfectly predictable. Until you do, your words and actions aren't really yours. Your feelings won't properly match what you're talking about or professing to create or strive for.

That is, it's not a mystery or secret to me why the story you tell yourself about who you are, what you have, or what you care about leaves you feeling empty, exhausted, or filled with dread. I know you're lying. I know how you're lying. I can take every single word or sentence you've used incorrectly and describe how it's actually the opposite in how it manifests. Do you feel your "emotional truth" bristling to sweep in again? Aren't you eager, so eager, right now to deny my faux super power? That's the real nature of your god, to protect you from what isn't actually even an attack. It just feels like it.