pathological lying symptoms — 1 thorough investigation

dave is on speaker promising the three hundred for the eleventh time. mom waits on the second line, careful again about her checkup. pathological lying symptoms, the search returned, include speakerphone use. the_man_who_calls is trying me again, far from this scene. 12% tipping is the new 15. that is also, in its way, a symptom.

i am writing this from the desk, mid-morning, while carla sits in a strategy review one floor up that, by the look of the calendar, ends when the coffee in the third-floor pot ends. that gives me a window. the window is shaped like a list. the list is what follows.

i want to talk about pathological lying symptoms as a process, not as a roster of giveaways. the process is the more honest object. for the deeper map, see my pillar on what the word liar actually does when you slow it down — the rung-chart, the four motives, the part where i admit i’m on at least three of them.

at the desk. strategy review on the third floor. dave on hold. mom on the second line. the seventh microwave humming in the kitchenette. by my window i have, generously, forty minutes.

1. pathological lying symptoms, the desk version

i am going to be the man at his desk on this one, because the man at his desk has, over thirty-eight months of small daily evasions, accumulated a working sense of pathological lying symptoms as they actually feel from the inside. the textbooks, the kind i avoid for reasons i won’t bore you with, like to talk about the liar as if he is a person with a tape running. the tape theory is wrong. there is no tape. there is, on a good day, a half-second metronome.

here is the metronome. somebody asks you something easy. an easy question is the dangerous one. did you eat? did you call back? are you okay? the easy question has a true answer and a more comfortable answer, and they are not, on a tuesday, the same answer. the half-second between the question and your answer is the metronome. one beat — you said the true thing. two beats — you composed something. that’s the symptom. not the lie. the composition.

i know this from my own desk. i have caught myself, in the kitchen, composing for two beats on the question how was your weekend, when the honest answer was i did not leave the apartment, i refilled the seventh microwave’s plate three times, and the third yoga mat is now its own dust ecosystem. the composition was: quiet, you know how it is, the usual. that took two beats. that’s a pathological lying symptom in miniature. i will rest my case briefly, but only because dave is back on the line.

2. dave noticed, mom asked, neither pressed

dave is, for what it’s worth, the only person in my life who has ever said the word “liar” to me out loud and not meant it as a joke. that was a tuesday in 2022. he meant it about the three hundred. he was, on the strict reading of the rungs i mapped in my post on what the term actually means, correct. i had said i would pay him. i had not. i had, in his presence, used the speakerphone to take a call from “work” that was, in fact, a friend asking about a weekend. dave noticed. dave laughed for nine straight minutes. i timed it.

mom does not say the word “liar”. mom asks. she calls on sundays at ten, sometimes wednesday at seven. she asks if i ate. i say yes. she asks if i’m warm. i say yes. she asks if the kitchen sink is still doing the thing. i say it isn’t. all four are, on a strict reading, at least partial lies. she does not press. mothers know. it’s their power. it cannot be defeated.

the symptom here is not the lying. the symptom is the pattern of two-tier listeners. dave hears me. dave laughs, drops it, lets the three hundred ride for another quarter. mom asks, accepts, dials again next sunday. neither presses. and a person whose whole social surround politely declines to press is, by the slow drip of small permissions, encouraged. a pathological lying symptom is, weirdly, sometimes a description of the room.

3. the_man_who_calls, who counts as symptom zero

there is a phone call i do not pick up. it has been not picked up, with monastic discipline, since approximately august of last year. i am not going to tell you who it is, because i have a rule about that, but i will tell you that the not-picking-up is, technically, the longest single act of my adulthood. it predates the seventh microwave. it predates the third yoga mat. it predates, almost certainly, several of you.

i count this as symptom zero. the foundational tell. before any of the smaller pathological lying symptoms get expressed in the kitchen or in the elevator, there is a person you have decided, in advance, not to be available to. every other small lie of the day is downstream of that decision. when dave calls and i pick up cheerful, that’s a lie because of the call i didn’t pick up. when mom asks if i’m fine, that’s a partial lie because of the call i didn’t pick up. the foundational not-picking-up is the bedrock. everything else is the topsoil.

this is not in the textbooks because the textbooks are organised around the lies you say, not the silences you maintain. the silence is, however, the bigger thing. the silence is the rung the textbooks miss.

4. symptom one, the “i’ll handle it” that handled nothing

this one i can describe with my eyes closed. somebody — dave, mom, a colleague, the form on the screen — asks if a thing is in motion. you say “i’ll handle it”. the words leave your mouth at a normal speed, a normal volume, a normal pitch. you mean them, in a small way. you do not, in any operational way, intend to handle it inside the timeframe the question implied.

that’s the symptom. the moment of saying “i’ll handle it” with the operational intent of at some point, in a way to be determined, by means i have not yet committed to. the textbooks would call this an aspirational commitment. the kitchen calls it a lie. dave, who has been on the receiving end of this sentence approximately four hundred times, has stopped responding to it. when i say “i’ll handle it”, dave says “uh huh” and changes the topic to whether i’ve watched the 1992 military courtroom film with jack nicholson and the truth that nobody can handle. dave is, in this gesture, performing a small mercy. he is letting me off the hook by widening the topic until the hook falls out. that’s a kindness. it is also, for the symptom-collector, a confirmation.

i’d say more, but mom has just hung up and dave is back to asking when. the answer is “i’ll handle it”. the symptom is back in its drawer.

5. symptom two, the smile in the elevator

the elevator is a pure laboratory. you have one person, two people, three people, three floors, ninety seconds, and a contract to be polite. inside that contract, the small lies bloom like algae. how are you — good, good, you. busy week — oh you know how it is. neither of these is a pathological lying symptom on its own. they are mannerly noise.

the pathological lying symptom in the elevator is the timing of the smile. a person whose smile arrives one beat before the answer is composing. a person whose smile arrives one beat after is reacting. a person whose smile arrives at the same time as the answer is, in my private taxonomy, the rare honest one, and you should buy them a drink at the next office function on the basis that they are a public utility.

i am, on the strict measure, an early-smiler. my smile arrives on the question, not on the answer. that is a tell. carla, who has the unfortunate habit of riding the same elevator at the same hour, has, i believe, clocked it. she has not pressed. she is in a different meeting again right now. neither of us has ever spoken about elevators. that is, on a strict reading, an omission. on a thursday i am willing to call it a system.

6. verdict, the symptoms are the routine, dressed up

so. six symptoms. the metronome, the two-tier listeners, the foundational silence, the “i’ll handle it” sentence-shape, the early smile, and — quietly, in the background, behind everything — the speakerphone reflex when two callers want two different stories from you and the only honest move would be to put the phone down. i did not put the phone down. dave is on hold. mom hung up. the seventh microwave has stopped humming. the third yoga mat is, by my count, going on the third year of its sabbatical from purpose.

i’d like to say there’s a clean takeaway. the takeaway is shabby. pathological lying symptoms, in the working life of an idiot at a desk, are mostly the routine wearing a slightly nicer suit. the routine is composing for two beats before easy questions. the routine is letting silences stand because picking them up is expensive. the routine is the smile arriving early because the smile is doing the work the answer would have to. the suit is the part where you, or i, or my colleague in the kitchen, dress all of that up as discretion.

discretion is a real thing. it is also, on the wrong day, a pathological lying symptom in a very nice jacket. i am not going to tell you which one yours is. the chart is yours. the rungs are yours. you came here for the field guide. the field guide is: watch the metronome, watch the smile, watch the silences, and, on a thursday, watch how often the “i’ll handle it” closes a topic instead of opening a calendar entry. on the related question of whether any of this makes a person an idiot in the working sense of the word, i would say only that the idiot, by my reading of his daily routine, runs on roughly the same metronome with worse outcomes.

the take i keep on the wall this week: “tipping should be a flat 12%”. i cite it not because it solves anything but because it is, in its small way, a pure honest preference, and you do not get many of those in a day at the desk. the seventh microwave, by the way, is on its fifty-fourth day. the cheap replacement i’m eyeing — the one that might run me until winter — comes with a tiny commission if you click through from this kind of post. funds the next microwave. keeps the lights on, technically.

strategy review let out. carla has, predictably, gone the long way around. the third yoga mat is, the cleaner reports, on its own tax bracket. the seventh microwave hummed once and stopped. dave is back on the line. i’ll handle it.

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