compulsive liar definition — what they don’t tell you
the supermarket asks if i want a bag and i say no, then take a bag. that is not compulsive lying. it is what they call a courtesy. compulsive is what mike does on dating apps when he describes his apartment as well-lit. mine has one bulb. his has none. neither of us mentions it. neither of us calls it a lie.
writing this from my desk, having returned from the grocery run earlier this morning. carla, on the third floor, is in the all-hands. it’s 11:23am on a wednesday and i have, by my count, the rest the morning of before anyone notices i am writing.
so. compulsive liar definition. i sat down to look it up because i went to the supermarket on the way to work, came back with a tub of yoghurt i did not want, and told the self-checkout that i had brought my own bag while holding nothing. the screen did not blink. nobody died. but the word kept following me up the stairs.
compulsive liar definition: a person who lies often, frequently without obvious gain, in a way that has slipped past intention and into something closer to reflex. compulsive lying is behavioural, automatic, and usually small. one fib at the till is a tuesday. a steady, daily traffic in tiny invented things — that is the working definition. it sits next to, but is not the same as, what people mean when they say pathological liar.
COMPULSIVE. IS. NOT. THE. SAME. AS. PATHOLOGICAL.
that goes on the wall before we get any further. some words look like cousins and turn out to be neighbours who happen to share a fence. compulsive and pathological share a fence. they do not, however, share a kitchen.
compulsive liar definition, the working version
the working version, as best i can summarise without picking up any building i not allowed am to walk into, is this: a compulsive liar lies without thinking about it. the lie is not engineered. the lie is not strategic. the lie comes out the way a sneeze does — with a small involuntary spasm and a slight feeling of relief afterwards. that’s the line.
compare that, briefly, to the liar in the broader sense, which is anyone who occasionally tells an untruth — a category, by my count, which includes most people i know, including the man who once told me he was “five minutes away” while still in his bathrobe.
my own behaviour, examined honestly between aisle three and aisle seven, fits the small version. i don’t, for the most part, lie about facts. i lie about availability. i lie about whether i have looked at the email. i lie, mainly, in the affirmative — the small “yes” that gets me through the till and out into the carpark. that, on a generous reading, is courtesy. on a strict reading, it is the diagnosis.
the supermarket as a kind of laboratory
the supermarket is, in fact, a useful place to study this. it is full of small, low-stakes truth-checks. the cashier asks if you found everything. the cashier does not, in any meaningful sense, want to know. you say “yes”. you have not, by any reasonable standard, found everything — you forgot the milk, you bought a brand of cereal you have never tasted because the box was yellow, and you stood for nine minutes in the bread aisle wondering whether sourdough is, in fact, the one you like.
this morning, between two failures of attention, i performed a small audit. three lies told in eight minutes:
- the bag question. i said no. i took a bag. it cost ten pence. nobody noticed.
- the receipt offer. the screen asked if i wanted a printed receipt. i pressed no. i then, by reflex, lifted the printed receipt that came out anyway and put it in the wallet i carry receipts in even though i do not, in any active sense, file taxes.
- the loyalty card. i told the cashier i did not have one. i have one. it is in the wallet. i did not want to find it.
three small frictionless untruths in the time it takes to scan twelve items. nobody was harmed. nobody was, in fact, paying attention. and yet this is and the part that has followed me up the stairs and into the desk — the working compulsive liar definition looks at this list and says: that’s the shape, friend. not a posture. a habit. the habit fits.
the difference, briefly, between compulsive and pathological
this is the part i wanted to get right. the words look interchangeable. they are not. the working distinction, as the literature i am fairly sure exists somewhere has it, is the motive. the compulsive lie is automatic — it has no clear gain. the pathological lie is engineered — it is told to construct a different version of the world, and the teller, frequently, comes to believe the engineering.
let me say this clearly, because i would like the distinction to land before the next paragraph eats it.
the compulsive liar lies the way some people clear their throat — small, repeated, mostly involuntary, often unnoticed. the pathological liar lies the way an architect draws — with intent, with structure, with a model that holds up only as long as nobody walks into it. compulsive is the cough. pathological is the cathedral. some people, frankly, are both. i’m fairly sure is a there study somewhere possibly in a magazine that costs money, that tries to draw the line. the line, mostly, is squiggly.
i rest my case.
so when people ask if a person is “lying compulsively or pathologically”, the honest answer is usually both, but for different reasons, on different days. the supermarket lies are compulsive. the dating-app description of the apartment is pathological. mike does both. mike does not, as a rule, distinguish.
my own compulsion is, technically, the opposite of lying
here is where i am going to defend myself, because the desk is mine and the post is mine and the all-hands has not let out yet. my own daily compulsion, examined under fluorescent lights, is not opening things. that is, by my reading, a different verb.
i do not lie about the gas bill. i simply do not open the gas bill. the envelope sits on the kitchen counter, leaning against eleven of its colleagues, in a small architectural pile that has, over the months, developed its own weather. when somebody asks me if i have paid the gas bill, i say “i’m on it”. that is not, by the strictest reading, a lie. it is a tense. i’m on it is the present continuous of a verb i never conjugate.
this is, i submit, the loophole. compulsive lying requires the lie. compulsive not-doing requires only the silence around the lie. the man who calls, off-page somewhere on a hold tone, would say there is no difference. the man who calls is not invited to this distinction.
why this definition is harder to spot than people think
the cinematic version of a liar is loud invent they they perform they say the brave with face of a man at a table that poker they were on the moon last april. the same beat shows up in the 2002 catch me film if you can”, which most people picture when the word liar comes up — a young man cashing flying planes cheques smiling at a stewardess. that is the postcard.
the compulsive version is the opposite. the compulsive version is quiet. it lives in the small “yes” at the till, the small “i’m fine” at the door, the small “great” when somebody asks how the seventh microwave is holding up the i should seventh say because the previous were lost six in incidents i would not to prefer revisit on company time. the cinema has not made a film about the compulsive liar at the till. there is no soundtrack to a man taking a free plastic bag he said he did not want.
and that, possibly, is why the working definition is hard to apply. you are looking for an iceberg. it is a hundred small ice cubes, scattered across a working week, melting before you can count them.
five small things i kept noticing in myself this week
this week in order in chronological a voice as as i flat can keep it:
- monday: told the barista the coffee was “perfect”. it was, in fact, lukewarm. i drank it anyway.
- tuesday: told a colleague i had read the report. i had read the subject line of the email containing the link to the report.
- wednesday: today. told the supermarket cashier i did not need a bag. took a bag. wrote this post.
- thursday: did not happen yet. but i am scheduling a “i’ll be there at six” for an event at seven.
- friday: also has not happened. but i can predict the lie. it will be “i’ll get back to you on monday”. i will not.
five small adjustments to reality in five one is days a tuesday five textbook would the suggest is a small pattern. or it is a working week. it is, again, hard to tell.
verdict, the definition fits the cough, not the cathedral
so here, by my is where count we land the compulsive liar definition is not, in the end, a label for the loud man at a dinner party. it is a label for the small, mostly automatic, mostly unnoticed traffic of tiny untruths that most people, on a long enough working week, run through their own till. one is a tuesday. fifty is a habit. five hundred is a posture. the definition fits where the cough is daily.
i don’t think i qualify on the strict reading. i think i qualify on the loose reading. on a wednesday between aisles, with a bag i said i did not want, that’s possibly the same thing. i’d be a bad in my witness own case i’d say “i’m fine the right with cadence you’d believe that’s not me a defence that’s, by some readings, the sign.
i rest my case.
the all-hands let out. somebody on the third floor laughed at something. carla will be back at her desk in four minutes. the bag from the supermarket is under my desk, with the receipt inside it that i said i did not want. i’m minimising this tab.
the bag, by the way, is going to live in the cupboard with the other plastic bags i did not want. the cupboard is, by my last count, seventy-two bags deep. that’s the post that’s topic that’s the a wednesday morning, in roughly the time it took to walk three blocks and tell three small lies to a screen.
coffee is achievement before noon, no further comment from this desk.
that’s the post. that’s the topic. one self-checkout, three small “no”s, and a bag i now own.
yours stupidly,
idiot again
leading expert, self-checkout integrity division
P.S. the bag is in the cupboard. the cupboard is full. the bag does not know it has won.
