The Problem With Lying
We are told that lying is wrong ever since we could barely form memories as kids by our parents, relatives or respectable adults in our lives.
But ironically enough, we have occasionally caught these preachers on telling lies from small things such as lying about the origin of the gift they brought or about bigger things.
Regardless, it’s a silent question that we all had in our minds or at least when we were kids. If lying was so morally wrong then why do we see adults doing them time and time again?
If we compare this to other forms of moral wrongdoings we were taught as children, whether that’s getting into fights, arguing or blaming others for our mistakes, we suddenly were judged harshly for it. We also never saw adults doing these wrongdoings as often as lying either.
So why does lying get preferential treatment in the hierarchy of wrongdoings and a pass for doing it in most circumstances.
Is it morally acceptable to many because everyone does it so no one wants to call it since it’s considered “beneficial” or there’s a deeper reasoning behind it?
The common sense answer we all know and society tells us secretly is that, the consequences of lying are negligible and it barely affects others. This is not true.
Read MoreBoredom's Role in Our Daily Lives
Everything that we want is in reach of our hands. Whether that may be the optimized pleasures of either sense of hearing or taste, we have it all. Things weren’t always like this. Such a wide range of accessibility to pleasures was not common even fifty years ago.
But especially when profits-driven corporations realize that we can hack the human mind through spending millions of dollars making refined trial-and-error products to scratch those exact itches we crave, whether that’s junk food or a video game, things start to make perfect sense.
The sudden spike in the variety of pleasures and its decimal optimization sounds good to many since it’s all but a transactional exchange between a product and our money.
This way of thinking isn’t wrong in theory but with how invasive things are and with how common they are, even with the smallest toolkit, things start getting messier.
Naval Ravikant said, “In an age of abundance, pursuing pleasure for its own sake creates addiction.”
It’s just true because the world we live in today is different. Everything is in abundance so we have a mismatch of natural and artificial desires causing us addictions which we clearly don’t want nor need to any meaningful degree.
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