compulsive liar — 1 fairly sure investigation

the atm screen blinks the balance and i squint until it stops being a number and becomes a feeling. compulsive liar, the article called it, when you forget the amount on purpose. pressing my shirts is a battle i sit out, every week. balance checking, the same. maggie used to do it for me. she has a small business now.

writing this from the desk on a wednesday with the door angled toward the corridor, which is what i do when i want to look like i’m working without committing to it. carla is upstairs at an all-hands on the third floor, and an all-hands gives me, at minimum, the better part of the morning, which is the unit of currency i still trade in.

so. compulsive liar. two words people deploy at the end of an argument they have already decided they won. they don’t really mean the clinical thing. they mean “i am tired of you and your edits”. i would like, on this wednesday, with an atm receipt in my pocket from the visit that produced the balance i have already declined to remember, to take the phrase apart and see what is left when you stop using it as a weapon. some of what is left applies to me. that is the investigation.

at the desk. the atm receipt is folded into the third pocket of the wallet i don’t trust, the one with the receipt-shaped slot that has been holding receipts since 2022.

i need to lay the rungs down before going further, because i keep meeting people online who think “compulsive liar” and “habitual cheat” and “person who exaggerates at parties” are the same thing. they are not the same thing. they live on a chart, and the chart is, broadly, the rung-chart i keep referring to in the working theory of the word liar i’ve been hammering at for a year. the entries on that chart, in order of seriousness: polite, strategic, omitter, compulsive, pathological. most of us are between two and three. some of us are at four. very few are at five.

compulsive liar, the atm version

here is the version of the compulsive liar i have personal experience with, by which i mean the version i have, on at least three wednesdays, been.

i went to the atm because the bank app on my phone has been sitting in a folder labeled “later” since approximately february. the atm is two blocks from the office. i went on a tuesday. i pressed the buttons. the balance came up. and in the half-second between the balance appearing and my brain processing it, i made a small decision. i decided to look at the screen as a kind of texture rather than as a number. shapes. an aesthetic event. i pressed the cancel button before any further information could enter. i took my card. i walked out.

and then, walking back, i told myself, in the small voice that does the negotiating, that the balance had been “fine”. i did not know if it was fine. i had not allowed it to be a number long enough to qualify as fine or not-fine. i had told myself a thing that was not, on a strict reading, a thing i could verify. that is not strategy. that is not policy. that is a small reflex, deployed against my own self, in the gap between the screen and the sidewalk. that is the rung. that is the compulsive liar, in the smallest form i can identify in the wild.

most people, when they hear “compulsive liar”, picture a man at a dinner party telling everyone he was, briefly, in a band. that exists, and it’s annoying, but it is a louder version of the same machinery. the machinery is: a question gets close to a tender place; a small lie deploys before the question can land; the liar moves on; the lie is forgotten by lunch. the man at the dinner party does it about his career. i do it about my balance. neither of us is, in that moment, gaining anything. we are simply lubricating the gap.

the balance i checked and then forgot on purpose

the second rung of compulsive lying — the one i suspect more people are on than will admit it — is the one you do to yourself, in private, and then ratify in public.

here’s the sequence. you check a thing. you do not like the answer. you look away before the answer fully arrives. you walk away convinced you “checked”, because, technically, you did. then somebody asks. you say, with mild authority, “i checked, it’s fine”. both halves of that sentence are, on a polygraph, lies. the first half is a lie because you did not check; you glimpsed. the second half is a lie because you have no idea whether it’s fine; you have decided, by the act of looking away, that it shall be fine. the decision is doing the load-bearing work of an entire bridge.

this is, by my private reckoning, the most common form of compulsive lying in adult life. it is small. it is unprovable. it is, frequently, harmless in any one instance and corrosive across two hundred. it is the cousin of the fool i sometimes worry i am becoming when i let small habits run my finances, except that the fool acts in good faith and the compulsive liar acts in slightly bad faith — the kind of bad faith you can plausibly deny to yourself in the elevator.

i am, on the balance question, a compulsive liar. i would like that on the record. i am not lying to anyone but myself, but the rung is the rung. the chart does not care about the audience.

maggie, who runs a small business, would not be at this atm

here is the part where, on most posts, i would bring in someone present. there is nobody present. carla is upstairs. dave has not called since monday. the desk is, by its standards, peaceful. so let me bring in somebody from the past, briefly, the way you bring in a witness who left town.

maggie, three coffees with me in 2019. maggie runs a small business now, employees with payroll, the whole adult thing. we lost touch in the gentle way you lose touch with people who go on to build something while you stay where you are. she is the kind of person who, if she ever stood at this atm, would read the number, write it down, file it, address it. she would not look away on purpose. she has, somewhere, a spreadsheet i can almost picture.

i bring her up not to compare — comparisons are a tax i have stopped paying — but because the existence of a maggie, in the world, somewhere, with a payroll, is a useful corrective to the small story i tell myself about how everyone is doing this. everyone is not doing this. some people are reading the balance. some people are reading the certified letters. some people are, frankly, fine. i am not those people. i am, on a wednesday, the atm-squinter, and i would like to be honest about that, in a small post that nobody who knows me will read.

for the literary precedent on the small reflex lie — the kind that ducks under the line so quickly the liar barely registers it — the patricia highsmith novel the talented mr. ripley (the 1999 film, since most readers have not, like me, finished the book) is the cleanest case study i can name. ripley is not a compulsive liar in the medical sense. ripley is a person who has decided, on a tuesday, that the truth is one of several available products, and he is shopping. that is a different thing. but it teaches the reflex.

i need that on the wall. compulsive lying is small. it is fast. it is, frequently, free. the moment it becomes a career — elaborate, sustained, believed-by-the-liar — it is a different rung, and that rung has its own post. you can find the working theory of the rung above this one, where lies become inventions and inventions become memory if you want the heavier version. this post is about the lighter one.

why “compulsive” is the lazy explanation

the word “compulsive” gets used as a verdict because it sounds like a diagnosis without requiring anyone to consult anything. you call somebody a compulsive liar and the word does the work of a chart. it is, in that sense, the lazy explanation. it gestures at clinical language without being clinical.

i looked it up, in the kind of place a man at a desk looks things up when he has a meeting’s worth of cover. the working sentence i kept seeing, in slightly different paint, was that compulsive lying is “a habitual reflex of small untruths, often unrelated to clear gain, frequently triggered by social discomfort”. the keywords there are reflex and discomfort. it is a posture, not a project. it is the lying you do when the truth would have, in that specific second, cost you more energy than you had.

which means, by that definition, almost everyone has been, on some wednesday, a compulsive liar. saying “i’m doing great” to a colleague you ran into at the elevator when you are, in fact, mostly not doing great. saying “yeah, i saw that email” when the email is one of the two hundred you saw the subject line of and dismissed. saying “i’m five minutes away” when you have not yet left. these are reflexes. they are not strategies. they have no plan behind them. they are the small lubrication.

the difference between a regular adult and a compulsive liar, in the heavier sense, is volume and consistency. the regular adult does it once or twice a day, mostly to spare a stranger’s feelings or buy themselves a small minute. the compulsive liar does it dozens of times, to almost everyone, almost reflexively, even when the truth would have done. that’s the rung. one is grease. the other is a way of life.

when the word is helpful and when it is shorthand

the word is helpful, in my view, when it is being used to describe a sustained pattern that the person doing it is, frankly, refusing to acknowledge. that is, after all, what patterns are for. you collect three small lies in a month from the same person, on the same kind of topic, and the word “compulsive” earns itself. it is a hypothesis. it is testable. you can, in theory, watch for the next instance.

the word is shorthand — and, honestly, a little unfair — when it is being used about somebody who told a single white lie about whether they liked a haircut. that is not a rung. that is a tuesday. ironing is a class war i refuse to fight, and so are most polite social lubricants; calling them “compulsive lying” is a category error that does the speaker more credit than the labeled.

i mention ironing because, broadly, this is the territory of small social maintenance. people who iron their shirts also tend to think people who don’t iron their shirts are, somehow, in the wrong about something. and people who don’t iron, like me, tend to suspect ironers of a kind of performative honesty that is its own quiet lie. these are not, in the chart’s sense, lies. these are aesthetic positions. the chart does not care about your aesthetic positions. the chart cares about whether you said a not-true thing on purpose, and how often, and whether you can name a reason.

so the heuristic, drafted at this desk: if the person can name a reason for the lie, they are a strategic liar. if the person cannot name a reason, but did it anyway, in a small voice, in a small gap between two truths, they are a compulsive liar. the rest is volume.

verdict, the atm has seen worse, probably

so. the verdict, on a wednesday, with the all-hands still going on the floor above me and the receipt still folded in the wallet i don’t trust:

i am, by the working definition, a compulsive liar in at least one specific direction, which is the direction of my own balance. i am, on most other directions, a strategic liar with a clean ledger of reasons. on a strict reading of the rung-chart, that puts me at three-and-a-half. it is not a number i’d put on a resume. it is, however, an honest number.

the atm, for what it’s worth, has seen worse. the atm is a public square in which dozens of people, every hour, perform some smaller version of what i performed on tuesday. they squint. they cancel. they walk away with a balance they have not allowed to land. the atm does not judge. the atm prints a receipt. the receipt goes in the wallet. the wallet keeps the receipt for a year, conservatively, possibly forever, because i am not the kind of person who audits the receipt wallet, and the receipt wallet has, accordingly, become a small monument to the things i declined to look at.

i am also, in the corner of the desk, mildly aware that the seventh microwave is probably watching all of this with its good-knife indifference, and that the third yoga mat under the couch in the apartment has, in some quiet way, been keeping its own ledger of postponements. these objects do not lie. they accumulate. that is, in fact, the difference between an object and a person — the object cannot lie, but it can, by sitting there, make a kind of statement.

all-hands let out at 11:23 by the sound of the third-floor doors. carla walked past the desk without looking in. either she was on her phone or she was pretending to be. both are, on a wednesday, equivalent.

the receipt is still in the wallet. the balance is still officially “fine”. the atm is still where i left it. the post is, broadly, done.

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