Everybody Lies

Note: This is a chapter from my book 7 Rules from a Calm Mind in a Chaotic World.

Once, when I was in school, I wore a new denim jacket to a ceremony. It didn’t cost much, but it looked more expensive than it was.

Everyone dressed to impress that day, but my jacket was the star. My friends assumed it to be costlier than its price and I didn’t correct them. I basked in the praise and let people believe what they wanted to believe. As I relished the moment, I was approached by a student I didn't know.

“That’s an amazing jacket! Must’ve cost a bomb … how much?” he asked.

I gave him an exaggerated number.

“Damn, I could never afford that. That number would probably pay for a week of meals at my home. Good for you, buddy!”

My heart sank. I realized the real cost of letting an innocuous lie float around. I gathered the courage to tell him the truth, and he was elated because he couldn’t believe that the cost was actually within his reach.

House M.D., one of my favorite TV shows, has a great line: Everybody Lies.

If there is one irrefutable truth in today’s age of social media, it is this: we all oversell our good times and hide our bad times.

We keep scrolling through wildly amplified portrayals and claims, and can’t help but feel like that friend of mine—admiring what we see, but with a tinge of despair, knowing we can’t have it.

Those amazing houses and vacations and dresses and bodies and relationships that you are bombarded with as soon as you open your favorite social media app are mostly a charade, and sometimes a facade for their broken lives.

I used to run a digital media company, and for the longest time, I had a front-row seat to this show. I’ve seen people lying out of their minds to get that extra ‘like.’ Back then, an old-school chap like me couldn’t wrap his head around it. Why go the extra mile for what’s basically just numbers on a profile? They weren’t real people standing there, praising the new denim jacket. I just didn’t get it.

Soon social media started taking the shape of the monster it is today—and I slowly understood the reality of it all.

We all want validation. And we all want to be entertained. Influencers know it, and they harvest this need of their audience by whatever means they can.

Celebrities and politicians have done it before, but their performances never felt personal. Maybe that’s because now it’s all about the individual. With small screens glued to our hands and our eyes fixated on them, it feels like the person on the other side is talking just to us. And this person is so relatable! She talks about the same things as we do and has the same problems we have, right?

But they’re not telling the whole truth. And why would they? Will you be entertained by it? Would you still care if they showed you who they really are?

I’m not here to diss the whole social media landscape or all influencers. Social media hasn’t been all bad. It has given voice to the repressed and broken the barriers to the creation of art and media.

But the fact remains that a huge percentage—possibly the majority—of what people are saying and showing online is just plain, blatant lies. And at first, we might see it for what it is, but over time, with repeated exposure, our minds start to believe those lies. As soon as that happens, we feel a slight tinge of despair like my friend did because we cannot fathom what’s wrong with us and why someone who looks like us—and has the same background as us—can have an amazing life and we can’t.

This despair accumulates in your heart and mind—with every scroll, like, and share. You slowly start to feel its weight on you. You start thinking that something is missing deep inside you, a void that you can’t fill.

Soon this void starts raising an alarm. It whispers that you are not enough, you are not worth it. The noise starts growing louder and louder. You want to break free from it desperately, but don’t know how.

Let me share what worked for me. This might sound simple but it is super helpful. Start by limiting your social media time every day. You can set a time limit on the app as well as through the settings on your phone. Do that.

Stop randomly opening the social app and scrolling through it when you are on a bus or walking home or resting on your couch. Instead, assign it a slot. Fix a daily time for it and maybe combine it with an existing habit. For instance, do it for 10 or 20 minutes after breakfast or brushing your teeth.

What we’re doing here is bringing order into the sheer randomness and haphazardness of our social activities. We want our mind to feel a sense of control over the time of exposure because right now it has no idea when we’d pick up the phone and start watching the memes.

Once the mind starts getting a sense of how this activity fits into our days, it’ll start pushing us to make it useful for ourselves. The gap of 24 hours helps your mind go over what you watched, break it down with critical thinking and then nudge you toward either steering clear of certain content or consuming more of what’s good for you.

It won’t be easy. You probably don’t know how addicted you are to the constant scrolling. It’ll take effort. You won’t stick to the routine at first.

You’ll catch yourself scrolling at random, on autopilot. Your fingers will do it before you even realize it. That’s what it feels like, isn't it? You are going deep into a thought and suddenly your head is moved down to look at the screen by what seems like an invisible force. You don’t even know when your hand reached for the phone in your pocket.

We’re trapped—and we need to take back control. All it takes is a quick googling to know that exposure to social media has been one of the biggest drivers of anxiety in the past few years. It has overtaken our lives and we need to start pushing it back to a time-limited activity that we do daily for a few minutes just for a chuckle.

After you’ve taken control, you have to see it for what it is—people acting it out for your entertainment. Don’t emulate them. Don’t aspire to be like them. And definitely don’t compare your life to theirs.

You don’t know their journey, what goes on behind the scenes, the sheer amount of effort it takes to create that five seconds of a short video, and the backlash that often follows in the form of hate comments.

The lives of creators are tough. It looks great and all, but they’re under constant pressure to perform and that’s how they sometimes give in to lying and falsities.

They deserve acknowledgment, and sometimes a cheer from us—but from a distance. Let’s look at the nuance and the effort, and appreciate (or condemn) the process instead of just the output.

Let’s not get rattled by content that goes against our beliefs. All it will do is fuel our anxiety.

Create some emotional distance from the content you consume. It’s their truth, not yours. Don’t let their truth affect your mental well-being.

Thanks for reading. If you liked it, consider getting my book.