How Laziness Propagates Lies

“Truth is work, people are lazy, for a great many lies you need suppose nothing more.”

“Truth is work, people are lazy, for a great many lies you need suppose nothing more.” — Eliezer Yudkowsky

I’ve written before about how most advice is bad advice, and how the best advice isn’t advice at all.

A major reason that most advice is bad advice is that it’s not tailored to your context and circumstances. Instead of thinking really hard about your situation, entering your shoes, and then offering carefully framed advice along with relevant personal experiences, most people leap straight to “should”ing all over you. “You should do this, you should do that, you should’t do this, you shouldn’t do that.” This isn’t always bad, especially if your advisor truly understands your situation or it’s something where a set of copy-pastable best-practices are universally applicable (e.g. for your first time on a roller coaster, “you should put your sunglasses in your pocket; you shouldn’t eat a Big Mac and fries beforehand”), but it’s usually bad.

It’s usually bad—and here’s the second reason that most advice is bad advice—because this exact habit of “should”ing that people practice on you is a form of laziness called “projection.” In this context, projection is when someone gives you prescriptive advice based on what they’ve experienced without paying attention to how your circumstances or perspectives might be different from theirs. Projection happens when people don’t make the effort to reflect on their experiences and discern between what has objectively happened to them and the subjective meaning they’ve ascribed to those happenings. Of course, total objectivity is asymptotic—it can never be achieved completely since human perception is inherently subjective—but like any asymptotic virtue, it’s worth striving toward.

Projection is the product of laziness and the manifestation of self-deception. And unfortunately, self-deception shared becomes an accidental lie, a crime by omission. What’s omitted is the effort to see reality as it is rather than how we have deceived ourself to believe it is.

Sometimes we deceive ourselves to protect ourselves from truths we’re not ready to face. We’ll often erase or rewrite traumatic memories to avoid reliving them. For really private childhood memories, this isn’t necessarily terrible, since we often exaggerate the severity of such events as much as we downplay them and it’s so hard to excavate the objective truth from something our five year old selves experienced.

But most of the time, shielding ourselves from the truth becomes a form of habitual laziness. Several years ago, I was talking with a friend who was thinking of going into the field of investment banking as an intern and then an analyst. His ultimate dream was to become a social entrepreneur bringing millions of people out of poverty, but his college career office, parents, and peer group were convincing him that a high-paying Wall Street job would give him the credibility, skills, capital, and network to change the world (I was skeptical). He then told me about a really successful and charismatic investment banker who had given a really convincing pitch for why my friend should become an investment banker. One day it clicked for me: “Of course this successful investment banker would make the case for why it’s smart to be an investment banker — he is projecting to validate and protect his ego! Why in the world would he tell someone not to become an investment banker? That would only make him second-guess his use of the last 15 years and face elements of his own self-deception.” There’s nothing wrong with being an investment banker—some people really enjoy it, and investment banks do valuable work for the economy—but in the case of this investment banker (who projected his experiences onto my friend without weighing any other options or asking my friend what his ultimate goals were), he was projecting. I later heard from another friend that this very investment banker turned out to be incredibly unhappy and couldn’t figure out why. His unhappiness only confirms that his projection indeed came from a place of self-deception…but even if he loved his life, an acknowledgement of difference in contexts would have made his case far more compelling and effective. In any case, my friend did not become an investment banker.

If the investment bankers at least had the credibility to speak positively about his profession (even though he secretly hated it), others project their opinions without any skin or soul in the game, and this is even more dangerous. “Don’t be a conservative — Glenn Beck is a conservative and he’s obnoxious,” says a mother to her child (the same could be said by a conservative mother to her child about liberal ideologies). There are so many problems with this statement that I don’t even need to explain it. But oh how common this logic is in households around the world. How easy it is to give your empty shell of an identity a legacy by indoctrinating and infecting young minds with your unsubstantiated and inconsequential opinions about sports teams and religions and ethnicities and political parties. When you project your opinions you not only spread (likely inaccurate) information but also signal that it’s acceptable to spread accidental lies, to commit crimes by omission, to live life without questioning your assumptions and testing your experiences against the equally valid perspectives of others.

“Truth is work, people are lazy, for a great many lies you need suppose nothing more.” It takes hard work to discover, discern, cultivate, and protect the truth. You can’t really get it from the newspapers, and you can’t just expect people to give you answers. The media makes money not off truth but off lazy views, and advice-givers get a kick out of telling you what you should do without ever respecting what might actually make sense for your circumstances.

The good news is that even though absolute truth (like objectivity) is probably unattainable, the quest for it is incredibly liberating and quite a bit of fun. So don’t be lazy. Show yourself some respect and you’ll help the rest of us out, too.

Ted Gonder is a social entrepreneur on a mission to even the odds for future generations. Click here to subscribe to quarterly updates, useful links, and lessons learned.