Hiddens

Today, I ended up talking to someone about self-deception. It started off as a simple conversation, about how we would work a lot over winter break, and try and finish all our assignments. We soon realized that we wouldn’t even get half as much as we had planned to do finished, and we were simply trying to make ourselves feel as though we would. Come to think of it, this could be simple procrastination- by claiming to finish everything over the holidays; we wouldn’t have to do it now. But where does this actually come from?

Logically, it seems so stupid to set up an agenda, you know deep down that you won’t mange to complete, and then be disappointed when you don’t complete it. And we do this in the simplest, most everyday things. It is often found that people make themselves believe something, convincing themselves it’s true to such an extent that they have completely forgotten that they initially lied to themselves. What I was wondering, was that is this ‘deception’ towards oneself really negative? Or could it have positive results too? For instance: a person sets out a goal for himself that he does not think he is capable of. He then convinces himself that he will manage to accomplish this goal. Believing this, he does not lose faith in himself, thinking he is worthless, but instead strives to achieve this goal as he believes he one day will. Surely this cannot be negative. Although, looking at it from a moral perspective, it certainly is bad to lie to oneself about certain things. People say that if one is continually lying to themselves, or “cheating themselves”, the end product will simply end up hurting and disappointing they themselves.

Both these being valid points- I don’t think there can quite be a distinguishing line stating that it is okay to lie to oneself in certain situations, if the lie motivated you, but not okay to lie in other situations which could be potentially harmful. To a certain level, self-motivation, even if a little exaggerated is certainly helpful, however, it cannot be pushed to a level of absolute untruth.

Note: This is based a lot on the assumption that “lying” in itself is bad.