Not Real, But Still Useful

For a moment, imagine with me that you are the parent of a welcomed, first, newborn child. She has beautiful, chubby cheeks, a smile that melts your heart, the softest skin you’ve ever felt, and her hair! Where did all that hair come from?

You hold her constantly, marveling. Other than her occasional tears and her almost constant smiles, she has no other ability to communicate with you yet you spend hours staring at her toothless grins and responding to tears by just guessing at what she must need.

To you, she’s the most beautiful, little specimen of a human being that could ever have possibly existed.

Yet, you’re living a lie (probably). Your baby, beautiful as she may be, will probably not win a “most beautiful baby alive” competition. Such competitions do exist, but even if your child were to win such a show, there are hundreds (perhaps thousands) of babies who could steal the show if they had simply been entered to win the prize.

Now imagine you’re sitting in a tall office building outside the executive suite along with twenty-eight other people you don’t know. They’re all dressed to impress. Everyone (except for you because you’re people-watching) has their eyes fixed on the executive’s door, waiting for their turn to interview.

Out of twenty-nine people, you’re second-to-last to interview. You’ve had plenty of time to build up nervous anxiety about the interview. You enter the room. You have, what you think, are pretty awesome answers to every one of the interviewer’s questions. The interview lasts thirty minutes. You sell yourself as the absolute best candidate for the job.

Again, living a lie. There are, quite possibly, tens of thousands of people in the workforce more qualified to do the job you’re after. Not only do they have better qualifications, but they also have no family obligations (remember your new baby) which means they’ll climb the corporate ladder with breathtaking speed while you’re still stuck in your cubical doing work that leaves you unfulfilled.

These are just two examples. Yet these two simple examples can lead us to a question:

Is self-deception bad?

“Fake it ’til you make it”. It’s a phrase that condones self-deception. I don’t love the phrase, but it accurately embodies how we have to approach so many things in life. Nobody has a first child being a great parent. We fail forward. A lot. Most of us don’t come into a new job knowing exactly what to do all the time, but we become students of the business. Before entering into our first serious relationship, we have no idea what it’s all about. We have to learn how to be a good partner.

There is, in truth, a degree of self-deception in most aspects of life.

At the extremes, self-deception can be life-saving or life-ending. On the life-saving side, you may have to dupe yourself into actually desiring exercise and giving up most junk foods which have been proven, on the whole, to extend life expectancy. Conversely, you may deceive yourself into believing that illicit drugs are okay; a lie you tell yourself until an overdose kills you.

Inside the extremes, biologist Robert Trivers explains that self-deception is about duping ourselves “in order to deceive others, creating social advantage.”

That’s not true all the time, but does ring true in many circumstances. I’m certain I duped my wife into marrying me because even after more than twenty years I’m still curious how a nerd like me ended up with a woman like her.

In the first example (the one with the newborn baby in case you’ve forgotten), while you dupe yourself with inflating the perfection of your child, you’re also deceiving the baby — though the baby can’t appreciate or understand the deceit. It’s an innocent self-deception that leads parents to sacrifice a great deal to rear good children who have a positive self-image and grow up able to care for themselves. Of course, balance is required or a child may never come to know how to properly handle failure and disappointment.

That’s only two examples. It does begin to paint a picture, however, how self-deception — believing things that are not real — can be useful.

At the highest level, healthy self-deception, it seems, is required to perpetuate the species. At the lowest level, can simply help us feel better in difficult times. The key is to know where the line is that you won’t (and shouldn’t) cross: where self-deceptions become more harm than good or all harm and no good. To know where that line is, you have to answer the question: “am I hurting anyone (including myself) with this deception.”