The Truth Serum Test
I think most people are remarkably good at lying to themselves.
Not the ordinary kind of lying. Everyone lies occasionally. Sometimes it's useful, sometimes it's cowardly, sometimes you just don't want to explain to someone why you don't want to attend their wedding.
I'm talking about something considerably more pathological. Constructing an entire identity around things you don't actually believe, spending years reinforcing that identity, and eventually becoming so attached to it that you can no longer distinguish the performance from the person.
Imagine administering someone truth serum and asking them to describe themselves. If the person under truth serum says something fundamentally different from what they ordinarily say, you've found your loser.
Honesty doesn't make you successful. You can be completely honest with yourself and still be an idiot. But at least you're an honest idiot. There is something particularly tragic about being an idiot who has also convinced himself that he's a genius.
Everyone has a story about themselves. They're ambitious. They're intellectual. They're passionate about technology. They're changing the world. They're building something important. They're interested in the future of humanity.
Fantastic. Now remove the audience. Would you still be doing it?
Would you still be studying physics if nobody ever knew you studied physics? Would you still be building that company if nobody called you a founder? Would you still want that "prestigious" job if you couldn't tell anyone where you worked?
These are uncomfortable questions because they separate the thing itself from the social rewards attached to it. And I suspect a remarkable number of people are in love with the latter.
They don't want to build. They want to be "builders". They don't want to understand. They want to be perceived as intelligent. They don't want to do something meaningful. They want a life that looks meaningful when described to someone else.
You can spend your entire existence collecting the aesthetic properties of a person you never actually became. A very elaborate costume. And the worst part is that you might genuinely start believing it.
That's the meta. Society hands you a script. Go to college. Get a good job. Make money. Buy things. Acquire status. Repeat until death.
Then someone discovers that the script is stupid and decides to rebel. Drop out of college. Start a company. Reject the corporate world. Become an independent thinker. Post about how everyone else is an NPC.
Congratulations. You've discovered the alternative script. Now you're just another NPC with a different wardrobe.
This is what I find hilarious about people who define themselves through contrarianism. If everyone does something, they must do the opposite. But why? If your decisions are determined by what everyone else is doing, you're still letting everyone else make your decisions. You've just added a negation.
And the meta keeps evolving. Once dropping out becomes fashionable, perhaps going to college becomes the rebellion. Once everyone is an entrepreneur, perhaps having a normal job becomes the unconventional thing. You can spend your entire life chasing the opposite of whatever happens to be fashionable and mistake this for independence.
The actual escape is not to be conventional or unconventional. It's to make the convention irrelevant. You have to stop selling out to an audience, including the audience that rewards you for being a rebel.
Go to college if you want to go to college. Drop out if you have a better reason to drop out. Work at a bank if you genuinely love the work. Build rockets in your garage if that's what you want to do.
But have a reason that survives the disappearance of the audience. And more importantly, own it. Whatever it is you're doing, own it. You don't have to be right about everything. You don't have to be successful. You don't even have to be particularly impressive.
There's a rather terrifying consequence to all of this.
You can't twist the fabric of reality without having it snap back. It doesn't work that way.
~ Jordan Peterson
You can lie to other people and get away with it. You can manipulate appearances. You can manufacture credibility. You can construct an identity so convincing that the entire world believes it. But reality is under absolutely no obligation to cooperate with your self-image.
You can convince everyone you're competent. That doesn't make you competent. You can convince yourself you're intellectually honest. That doesn't mean your beliefs survive contact with evidence. You can convince yourself you're pursuing something meaningful. That doesn't make the underlying emptiness disappear.
And the more your identity depends on the fiction, the more expensive it becomes to acknowledge the truth. That's the really dangerous part.
A small lie is relatively easy to correct. But a lie you've organized your entire existence around becomes a structural dependency. Your career depends on it. Your relationships depend on it. Your self-respect depends on it. Eventually, telling the truth threatens to demolish the very person you believe yourself to be.
So you double down.
You reinterpret evidence. You rationalize contradictions. You surround yourself with people who reinforce the performance. You become extraordinarily sophisticated at defending something you should have abandoned years ago.
And then one day something breaks because a false model of reality eventually becomes a terrible instrument for navigating reality.
The consequences don't always arrive immediately. Sometimes the deception works for years. Sometimes people really do escape accountability. But the longer you build upon a false premise, the more of your life becomes dependent on its remaining undisturbed.
And when reality finally refuses to cooperate, the collapse can look astonishingly disproportionate to the original mistake.
This is why the truth-serum test matters. It's not merely a question of personal authenticity. It's a question of whether your understanding of yourself bears any resemblance to the world you're actually inhabiting.
You are going to die anyway. Not as a philosophical exercise. Your brain will stop working, and every experience you have ever had will cease. Everyone you know is going to die. Everything you've built will eventually disappear. Even if you somehow escape biological death, the universe itself is not particularly interested in preserving your achievements.
You have a finite number of mornings left. And you're spending them doing what, exactly?
Optimizing your LinkedIn profile? Trying to get promoted from VP to Senior VP of Some Completely Made-Up Corporate Function? Spending fourteen hours a day in a job you hate so you can afford a lifestyle that requires you to continue working fourteen hours a day?
Why? Maybe you genuinely love high-frequency trading. Maybe you find extraordinary beauty in price discovery. Maybe making markets marginally more efficient fills you with the same wonder that a physicist experiences looking at the universe.
Fantastic. I mean that. But if you hate every minute of it, and the only thing keeping you there is the salary, the prestige, or the fear of no longer appearing successful, then what exactly are you doing?
You have somehow allowed the opinions of people who are also going to die to determine how you spend the only life you have. This is an astonishing arrangement.
The point isn't that life is meaningless and therefore nothing matters. It's almost the opposite. You have to confront the possibility that there is no grand cosmic scoreboard before you can stop worshipping all the little scoreboards people have invented for you.
Money. Status. Prestige. The right career. The right university. The right kind of success. They're perfectly useful things. But they're terrible gods. And if you don't recognize that distinction, you can spend your entire life kneeling before something you don't even believe in.
I think we've developed a fairly deranged relationship with productivity. Everything has to produce an outcome. Everything has to justify its existence in terms of some measurable improvement.
Read a book to become smarter. Exercise to become attractive. Learn something to improve your career. Make friends to expand your network. Build a side project to develop your personal brand.
Can you just do something because you like doing it?
Can you spend an afternoon working on a completely useless technical problem because you find it interesting? Can you learn about semiconductor physics without needing to turn it into a startup? Can you build something that doesn't have a market, a business model, or any conceivable practical application?
Apparently this is becoming a radical proposition.
There's something profoundly defective about a life in which every activity must justify itself by producing some other outcome. At some point, you have to arrive at something you actually want. Otherwise you're constructing an infinite chain of things you do in order to do other things.
It's almost comical. You've become extraordinarily proficient at the means and completely forgotten the ends.
And then you die.
Peterson's warning to stay awake, speak properly, and be careful is not merely a demand for good manners. It's a recognition that your life is an ongoing encounter with something vastly more complicated than your ability to understand it. You are not sufficiently intelligent to anticipate every consequence of your actions. None of us is.
So perhaps you should be a little less certain. A little more willing to admit what you don't know. A little more careful about the stories you tell yourself.
Don't be a sell out.