pathological liar symptoms — 1 investigation

the coffee shop has a queue of people pretending to be patient. pathological liar symptoms, the screen said: avoidance, embellishment, indifference. i ordered the small. pension, in this country, is faith-based. so is patience in line. the microwave at home, i remembered, is also faith-based. i only push start.

i was there for fifteen minutes before my desk reclaimed me. carla had a 3:18pm training on the third floor and the doors stayed shut, which gave me roughly the rest of the morning to draft this. i opened a notes tab on my phone and wrote three words: dodged, untouched, rehearsed. that was the working list before any caffeine reached the brain.

the prompt that followed me back to the office was simple enough. pathological liar symptoms, plural. not the diagnosis, not the case study, not the long word in latin. the visible bits. the small flags a person waves without meaning to. the kind of working list of what a liar actually is and how to tell that you would compile if you were keeping a quiet ledger on yourself, which i am, and which you should consider doing too. i am writing this from the desk. the queue at the coffee shop has, by now, dispersed. the screen has moved on to a recipe.

1. pathological liar symptoms, the working list

here is the working list as i drafted it on the napkin before the queue moved. five items, no clinical noise, no jargon, no manual-anything, because i am not the kind of man who picks up the phone, much less the kind of man who consults a manual. pathological liar symptoms, in the way the word actually lands when you spot them on a wednesday, are these: a phone that does not get answered, mail that does not get opened, an excuse that has been polished into a small monologue, a calendar with no entries on it, and a banking app with a year-old session timestamp. each of those is a thursday on its own. assembled, they are a posture.

i am, by the way, on a strict reading, on at least three of them as i type. i am writing this from the desk on what is, by my count, a wednesday. carla’s training door has not opened. the rest of the morning is mine if i don’t squander it on the queue replay in my head.

i should also say, before we go further, that i’m not interested in the inner life of any liar in this post. i am interested in what shows up on the surface. the visible part. the small daily evidence. that is the entire investigation.

2. symptom one, the dodged phone

the first one is the easiest. somebody calls. you do not pick up. you let it ring out. the phone goes to voicemail, which is, in a non-trivial percentage of cases, full and has been full since around august. that is the symptom. that is also, on most days, my morning.

i told the queue this morning, in my head, that the second man behind me was a person who would never let a call go to voicemail. he had the air of a man who answers. i, by contrast, have the air of a man who has, at some point, decided the phone is a suggestion, not a contract. the line between us is small but visible. it is, on the rung-chart, a symptom.

not every dodged call qualifies. a scam call dodged is hygiene. a known number dodged for the third week running, with a voicemail full of receipts you did not transcribe, is a flag. why i avoid certain numbers in particular is, frankly, a longer note for another desk morning.

3. symptom two, the unopened envelope

the second is mail. specifically, mail that has been allowed to lean against the inside of the door for so long that the door has begun to seem decorative. somebody who is, broadly, in custody of their own life, opens the mail. somebody who has decided that opening the mail will require a phone call, which will require a payment plan, which will require a conversation with a person who has a script — that person, instead, lets the pile lean.

i would like to say, plainly, that i am not currently in the leaning-pile category, but i am also not currently in the opened-pile category. i am in the third category, which is the open-the-cheap-ones-and-leave-the-red-ones category. on a strict reading, that is a symptom. it is the symptom of someone who has decided that ignorance, in some controlled doses, is an affordable form of triage.

which is, conveniently, where my preferred hot take comes in. a pension is a faith-based retirement system. so is, in fairness, the unopened pile. you tell yourself the system will sort itself out if you don’t look at it. you light a small candle. you proceed with your morning.

4. symptom three, the rehearsed excuse

the third symptom is sound, not surface. it is the cadence of an excuse that has been said too many times to be fresh and not enough times to be flat. the words come out a fraction too clean. a person telling the truth, on a wednesday, fumbles for the boring details. a person who has been rehearsing has the boring details on a small card.

i am, on the rung-chart, occasionally guilty of this. when the landlord asks, in the elevator, about the kitchen sink, i have a small monologue that i have, by now, polished. “i think we got it. mostly. we’ll see.” the cadence is too smooth. the smoothness is the symptom. the truth, if you held a torch to it, is that the sink is still doing the thing, and the thing is, broadly, my fault, and i would like, on a wednesday, to be left alone with it.

here is the tell. a rehearsed excuse, given twice in the same week, has different supporting details each time. the structure is identical, the props rotate. the man at the petrol station has, in one telling, a brother who was almost in the band. in the second telling, a cousin. nobody in the audience usually checks. the symptom is for the people who do.

5. symptom four, the calendar with no entries

the fourth is structural. open the calendar app. look at the next two weeks. count the entries. somebody who is, on a strict reading, in custody of their week has, conservatively, four to six entries on it: a doctor’s appointment, a dinner, a meeting that should have been an email, a yoga class they will not attend. somebody who is, on the rung-chart, drifting — the calendar is, broadly, blank. the days have nothing on them. the days, instead, are storage.

my own calendar, i can tell you with the confidence of a man who just looked, has two entries between today and the end of the month. one is “carla q3 follow-up” and one is “buy bread”. the rest of the month is, technically, available. that is, on the rung-chart, a symptom. it is the symptom of a person who has decided that committing to a thing in writing is itself a small contract he is not, this month, in the financial position to honour.

i would like to say this is not the same thing as being unbusy. unbusy is a posture. unbusy means the entries are not on the public calendar but they are, in the man’s head, scheduled. an empty calendar — really empty, mental and digital — is the symptom. the days have nothing planned because the days have nothing they want to be. that is a different country. the calendar will not tell you.

6. symptom five, the bank app, untouched

the fifth, and the one i’d put on the wall with a thumbtack if i had a wall i was allowed to put thumbtacks in, is the bank app. the small icon. the one with the polite blue logo. the one you have not opened since some point in early spring. the icon is on the second page of the home screen, not the first, because somebody who needs not to see the number has moved it back there on purpose.

i am, in the interest of full disclosure, exactly that man. the bank app on my phone has, last i checked, an old session token. it asks me to log in. logging in would require facial recognition, which would require a moment of looking at my own face while looking at a number, which is two pieces of unwanted information at once, before lunch. so the icon stays on the second page. so the number stays a guess. so the morning continues.

this isn’t, by the way, gaslight territory — it isn’t lying to anyone else. gaslighting is what you do when you want another person to doubt their own evidence. this is what you do when you want yourself to doubt your own evidence. for the louder, second-person version of the same posture, see the long write-up on gaslighting and its small daily mechanics. that one is about other people. this one is about the icon.

for cinematic context — and this is the only outbound i’ll allow myself before the verdict — the public shorthand a lot of people reach for around small, repeated, low-stakes lies is the 1997 jim carrey courtroom film about a man whose mouth is forced into truth for twenty-four hours. the movie’s joke is the constant, low-grade lying that the rest of us file as “tuesday”. on the rung-chart, that’s not pathological. that’s the bottom rung. the bank app icon is, technically, the same rung, only the audience is me.

7. verdict, the symptoms are mostly wednesday

so here is, by my count, the position. five symptoms. dodged calls, unopened mail, rehearsed excuse, empty calendar, untouched bank app. assemble all five and you are, on the rung-chart, in a posture that someone, eventually, will give a longer word to. assemble two or three, and you are most adults i have met. assemble none, and you are either eight years old or running for office.

i am not, in this post, going to give you a checklist score or a coloured chart. checklists, in my private filing, tend to fail at the desk. what i would say, instead, is this: the symptoms are visible. they are not buried. they show up in the small surface evidence of a week. you do not have to be a clinician to spot them. you have to have a notebook and an honest morning.

i had, for thirty seconds at the coffee shop, both. the queue dispersed. the screen stopped showing the working list and started showing a recipe i would not make. i carried the napkin back to the desk. carla’s door is still closed. the third yoga mat is, broadly, still under the couch from 2023, which is itself a small symptom of a related but separate investigation.

the verdict is mild. the symptoms are mostly wednesday. you will recognise yourself in two of them. that is, on the rung-chart, the floor most of us share. ignorance is, in this case, financial therapy. it is also, in this case, the only honest closing argument i have.