I understand sometimes people lie to avoid hurting someone, but a lot of the time it seems unnecessary. When something really important happens and honesty matters, people still choose to lie instead of just telling the truth.
I understand sometimes people lie to avoid hurting someone, but a lot of the time it seems unnecessary. When something really important happens and honesty matters, people still choose to lie instead of just telling the truth.
So many great answers, and they are all different yet accurate!
Another contradiction I’ve found (and is reflected in a lot of the answers) is that everyone SAYS that they want people to tell them the truth, but when we actually do tell them the truth, they turn into a tiger and devour us, or a similar negative reaction. We request the truth, but at the same time, we psychologically train everyone around us to lie to us.
the problem is we want other people to tell us the lies we tell ourselves. and when we don’t get that, we get very upset because it hurts our self-worth or self-image.
also the lies we tell are much more simple than the truth. a lie is ‘you always look pretty’. the truth is much more complex, and we generally dislike complexity.
also a lot of value judgements are entirely relative/subjective and human beings are terrible at being objective and generally find objective measurements emotionally unappealing compared to the subjective approve or rejection of our peers.
like objective I know where I stand economically, but subjectively, to other people, I can either very wealthy, or very poor, because those value judgements are primarily formed from their frame of personal reference, not national statistics.