Dealing With Attractive Lies & Uncomfortable Truths
Lessons from the Matrix
One of the most difficult things I’ve come across on my path of personal development is facing uncomfortable truths about my life. They can be so tempting to just skirt over, especially when they’ve been left to fester.
Of course, some truths aren’t too hard to face, like admitting you’ve let yourself go a little. Or admitting you’ve done something unimportant, wrong. But that’s not what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about the elephant in the room that’s been growing for years; the skeletons in your closet that have been gathering dust for decades. Those family issues everyone knows about, but no one dares bring up, at the table. I’m talking about truths locked away at the back of our minds, the ones that make us feel uncomfortable when they do creep up to the surface.
I’m talking about the kind of truths we chose to ignore, even when ignoring them has a clear negative impact on our lives.
Why can the truth be so hard to face?
Why can it be so uncomfortable that people would choose willful ignorance to their own detriment?
Why do some women continuously go back to men who cheat?
Why do people stay in marriages long after they’re clearly finished?
Why can it be hard to admit that big life decisions we’ve made may have been wrong?
Why do some people ignore the obvious health problems that they’re experiencing? I’ve heard of people dying from cancerous lumps that could have been effectively treated if they were reported near the time the patient first noticed them.
The truth can be uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable. And the idea underlying the lies we chose to live instead, can be very enticing.
Having to face the reality that your husband or wife is cheating on you, that you’ve possibly got cancer, that you’re no longer going to be the golden boy med student your parents wanted, that you’ve “wasted” the last 10 years of your life in a career you never wanted, isn’t nice. It’s uncomfortable. It hurts. It can cause anxiety, panic, and even depression depending on how you deal with it.
Jordan Peterson describes this kind of scenario perfectly in his book 12 Rules For Life. In Chapter 8 “Tell the truth — or, at least, don’t lie,” Jordan describes a typical story of a woman who makes a promise to herself as a teenager to retire at 52. But this is the promise of a naive teenage girl.
By the time she gets older and is working towards that goal, she might realize it is no longer valid. To face it might be painful because if she’s based her whole life around that goal, to admit it’s no longer valid might put into question her whole life. Who wants to open up that pandora’s box?
On the other hand, initially, it’s a lot more psychologically pleasant to continue with the lie that there is no problem, things are going well, and she’s on the right path.
This attractive lie is a lot more enticing than the uncomfortable truth. You might even come up with a number of justifications as to why you should continue as you are, even if you’re not feeling it.
This whole idea is also illustrated perfectly in films like the Matrix. When Neo chooses to take the red pill, he wakes up to reality as it is. Again, it’s uncomfortable: he’s in this weird tub of goo with all these tubes stuck in him, he doesn’t know where he is and he’s completely confused. He’s not got his balance or strength. The real world is basically a desolate wasteland and he nearly has a panic attack as he wakes up to it as it is.
It’s rough, but that’s life, sometimes the truth can be that devastating. Sometimes it can completely knock you off your feet, causing emotional backlash as you lose what you thought was true in exchange for the seemingly crappy new reality.
This new reality is so bad that Neo actually considers going back into the matrix. In fact, there’s one guy who does opt to go back into the matrix because he’s so sick of reality. He makes a deal with agent Smith to rat out his friends.
Why would someone optionally choose to go back to the unconscious illusion of the matrix once they’ve already realized it’s a lie?
Familiarity and comfort.
A woman might love the idea that her husband is a good, faithful man. To keep that attractive lie, she may just choose to ignore the truth.
But the problem with a lie is that it’s not real, and we live in reality. So it will eventually catch up to us. You can’t live that lie forever. It can’t be sustained over time because it’s not actually there. It’s not happening and eventually, this will show.
It’s like the guy who pretends to have lots of money when he’s actually broke and in debt. Eventually, he can’t keep it up because to live like you’re rich over time, you actually have to be rich. There’s only so long you can keep paying for fancy meals and nice things until your credit card gets maxed out.
In this sense, the lie just bides time. But the problem is, while your lie is biding time, the consequences of that lie are only getting worse. So by the time you have to face it, it’s 10x worse than it had to be.
Another cost of living a lie is the negative impact it has on your mental health. It’s well known in the field of psychology that repression contributes to mental illness. Prominent figures in the field of psychology like Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Alfred Adler have all written about the damaging effects lying and repression of truth have on mental health. They had all seen first-hand the effect this had on the mental state of their patients.
Then there’s the impact living a lie has on your character.
Going back to 12 Rules for life, Jordan Peterson writes:
“If you betray yourself, if you say untrue things, if you act out a lie, you weaken your character. If you have a weak character, then adversity will mow you down when it appears, as it will, inevitably.”
Going back to those earlier examples, as debilitating and painful as it can be, facing the truth at least gives you something to work with. It gives you the opportunity to fix the problem. Once the truth was faced and Neo made the decision not to go back to sleep, but to start working on making things better, he was able to learn, train, level himself up.
Then through collaboration with the others who had also made that same decision to live in the real world — as ugly as it was — they were able to start fixing the problems, fighting against their enemies, and rebuilding their world.
This takes bravery, you can’t do it when you’re still pretending everything is fine.
But how can you become brave enough to open that closet and dust off those skeletons?
As a starting point, you have to value life and you have to believe that by facing the truth, life can be better. One way you could do this is by reading and listening to inspiring stories. There are stories like this in all walks of life. People like Nelson Mandela, David Goggins, Francis Ngannou, Dwayne Johnson (and millions more) have done amazing things from seemingly terrible situations.
From uncertainty, chaos, depression, you name it; they’ve managed to create amazing lives, not just for themselves, but for other people, through facing ugly truths.
We interact with the world and the people in it on a daily basis, so it’s not just your life that can be improved by facing the truth but the lives of those around you.
Slavery was abolished because individuals decided to face an ugly truth. Dictators have been overthrown because individuals decided to face an ugly truth. Women have more rights across the world because individuals decided to face an ugly truth. There are countless lives across the world that are better off now because individuals decided to choose the ugly truth over an attractive lie.
It’s easy to avoid facing the truth with justifications like, “life is shit anyway.” “It wouldn’t work out for me.” “There is no way to improve or resolve these issues.” “Things could never get better.” “Other people may have been able to do it, but I can’t because ….”
But of course, that’s just another lie, isn’t it? The truth is, we really don’t know what’s possible. All you’d need to do is look at a handful of those inspiring stories to verify this. That’s not to say that things will always turn out great if you just face the truth. Maybe they wouldn’t. We don’t for sure know.
But if there’s even a chance you could make things better, is it not worth a try?
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