Liars Are Bad For Our Health

having some hope while boob-deep in bullshit

I’ve always been ambivalent about my previous job but when I saw that my old website had been deleted, it hurt. I love writing recipes and sharing them with people for a living. It’s my life’s work and a portion of it just disappeared like it was nothing. That’s what I get for enduring a bunch of bullshit for so many years just to get the job done: nothing. This might feel familiar. All of us are enduring so much bullshit just to get through each day under this new US administration: chaos at the grocery store, fear of casual cruelty, and endless uncertainty about the future. But where will all this stress get us? We could be using all this energy, all this vigilance, to make our communities and world better. Instead we’re forced to focus on fixing problems we’ve already solved. It’s meant to exhaust us. I’ll have to dig up all my old recipes and spend days of my life putting them somewhere else online for people to find. Needless and exhausting.

The same thing is happening everywhere in the US. Air travel is increasingly unsafe after everyone in charge of keeping it safe started getting fired. Imagine that. Manufactured problems created to keep us treading water. Government officials are loudly shouting that they want to make the country healthy while defunding programs, rolling back regulations, and firing the people whose job it was to do just that. Hell, we’ve got a wellness influencer nominated to be the next Surgeon General. These are the worst kind of liars and they’re everywhere cosplaying as loving husbands, Sunday school teachers, and social media personalities. The cumulative effects of this last decade make me want to walk straight into the ocean, but we can’t let these fuckers get us down. Let them lie to each other. We have a future to build.

I wasn’t always so clear-eyed. I used to abandon myself for even the smallest goal. I’d do the hardest thing, stay in the argument, or work the longest hours thinking that I was proving something. The bumps and bruises didn’t matter. I was only focused on the results. The rest didn’t seem to matter as much. Whether I was writing cookbooks, dealing with difficult people, or navigating insane lawsuits, I could keep plodding right along as though it was business as usual. This isn’t a brag, it’s a confession. I’d endure a tsunami of bullshit because I thought that as long as I knew it was bullshit, it couldn’t really hurt me. I’m here to tell you that I was wrong. The bill always arrives. The lies creep into you and start to rot. Mark Twain famously said “Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.” It didn't matter how hard I tried, the only way to win is to stop. Don’t negotiate with terrorists.

Don’t bother with these dummies

This is advice we all need to hear. For too long we’ve been in a conversation with idiots. I mean that in the most disrespectful way possible. The US has been overrun with a vocal minority of criminally stupid people who expect us to believe them over our own eyes. It doesn’t matter what facts you bring to the table, all the errors you point out, the data, the expert testimony, none of it will move them. Václav Havel, the famous Czech statesman, author, and dissident, wrote about this phenomenon in 1978 as it related to his own country under Soviet rule: “The principle involved here is that the center of power is identical with the center of truth.”¹ They can’t stop gaslighting us because they believe that power means they get to dictate the truth. They didn’t steal that, say that, do that thing you have a video of them clearly doing. Bring all the evidence you want. You will get sealioned into insanity. I’ve been in a 14 year-long argument with an idiot and learned all of this the hard way. Stop looking for logic where there is none. You have to stop the conversation.

from the forever relevant xkcd

Living alongside all of these lies hurts us, even when we know they aren’t true. Repetition, despite the evidence and our previous knowledge, grinds away at our grasp on reality. It’s called the illusory truth effect. It’s why propaganda and advertising work so well. It’s why your grandma thought she was a bad driver even though she’d never been in an accident; your grandpa just kept saying it. This human tendency to believe information to be correct after repeated exposure makes sense. We can’t walk around questioning everything. If people are yelling about something being true, it’s logical to believe them, except that we’re surrounded by liars. Listening to all these lies degrades our knowledge of the truth through processing fluency. It doesn’t matter that we know better. Psychology Professor and researcher Lisa Fazio at Vanderbilt University studies this phenomenon across age groups. She told Wired in 2017- "When you see the fact for the second time it's much easier to process---you read it more quickly, you understand it more fluently. Our brain interprets that fluency as a signal for something being true." It’s why the idea that MSG is unhealthy is so hard to shake from our mind. Fucking repetition. Staying rational and grounded in actual facts is a practice we all need to build into our daily routines. Make your sanity a habit. Everything is riding on it.

Life is too short to spend it enduring people with historical, ethical, and moral amnesia. We are in an economic hostage situation while we share discount codes and memorize choreography. It’s time to wake up. We’re forgetting that we have so much power. The keys to this prison are in our hands just like they were in mine at my old job. Havel says as much at the end of his essay:

“For the real question is whether the brighter future is really always so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us, and kept us from developing it?”²

Don’t let this current administration dictate your vision. Don’t let idiots ruin your life. We can’t debate this problem away. No amount of information will change their minds. We have to change our own minds and stop the conversation. That’s the only way we’re getting out of this moment. It’s how I got out too. The future is already here, we just have to go live like it.

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Tomorrow is Mother’s Day here in the US so if you’re looking for some recipes, I’ve got you covered. Looking for something else? Consider becoming a paid subscriber to get even more recipes and tons of help in the kitchen.

How do you deal with liars in your life? How are you combatting all the bullshit being thrown at you? Let me know in the comments!

xoxo,

Michelle

1. This quote comes from his essay The Power of the Powerless. You can read it here and here.

2. This also comes from The Power of the Powerless. I’m clearly a fan.