treatment for habitual lying — 1 thorough investigation

the airpod, the schrodinger fridge, and the contact form chatgpt screens. three objects, three witnesses, one running list. treatment for habitual lying, the thread said, is a habit of its own. a spoon is a smaller bowl. redundant. so are most cures. so is the small bowl by the sink, full of receipts.

writing this from the desk at 9:18, with the rest of the morning before carla returns. she is upstairs in the annual planning meeting, third floor, the one that runs long because someone always brings printed handouts. that gives me space to make a list, and a list is what the internet keeps insisting i need.

i typed treatment for habitual lying into a search bar last night, mostly to confirm what i suspected, which is that the internet thinks of it as a small condition with a long handle. there are five things below. they are all things i actually do, which is a low bar i am proud of clearing.

1. treatment for habitual lying, the desk list

treatment for habitual lying, when you read the longer pieces on it, comes down to two things, and both of them are boring. notice when the small one happens, and stop the small one before it grows a tail. that is the entire technique. the rest is packaging. you can read a more careful version of the same idea on the pillar investigation about being a liar, which is where i first put the running tally that lives on my desk.

the list i made this week has five items. they are not therapy. they are not medicine. they are routines a person can do alone at a desk, and the routines are the point. a spoon is a smaller bowl. a routine is a smaller treatment. redundant in the right direction.

i keep the list on a sticky note next to the keyboard, written in the kind of handwriting that suggests i was hurrying so carla wouldn’t see. she didn’t. she was on the third floor with the printed handouts.

2. treatment one, journaling, briefly

the first treatment is journaling, which i resisted for years because the word sounds like something a stefan would recommend with a glass of orange wine in his hand. stefan is the wine man at the corner shop. his entire personality is a wine list he has memorized in two languages. when stefan suggests journaling, the wine bottle in his hand is doing more of the talking than he is. and yet he is not entirely wrong.

the version i do is two days, not forever. two days is the limit because anything longer becomes a project, and a project becomes a place i go to lie about how the project is going. two days is short enough to be honest. i write down the small things i said that were not strictly true, and i write down the version that was. the second column is shorter. that is the diagnostic.

i looked it up to make sure i wasn’t inventing the technique, and the technique exists, in some form, in the literature i’m fairly sure exists. it has a longer name in the literature. on my desk it is called the two-day journal, which is what it is.

3. treatment two, the fridge audit, which is just opening it

the second treatment is the fridge audit. i call it schrodinger’s fridge because i don’t know what’s in there until i open it, and once i open it, the leftovers either exist or they were never there at all. you laugh. it works.

here is how it relates to lying. half the small lies i tell are about whether i have eaten, whether i have food, whether i need to stop at the corner shop on the way home. the fridge audit is the test that closes the loop. open it. look. say out loud what is in there. no narration. no editorial. then make the decision based on the inventory. it sounds simple because it is. the simple things are the ones a habitual liar avoids the most, which is also part of the diagnostic.

the audit takes ninety seconds. i timed it once with the airpod stopwatch. ninety seconds against months of saying “i have stuff at home” when i did not.

4. treatment three, the contact form, screened by chatgpt

the third treatment lives on the contact form on the website i don’t really run. the form is screened by chatgpt because i don’t read incoming mail directly anymore. people ask me things. i used to give the answer that sounded right in the moment. now the form goes through a layer that flattens the question into something i either know or do not. if i do not, it says so, and i do not get to perform.

this is treatment because the small lies of habitual lying are mostly performance. the layer between the question and my answer kills the performance before it boards the train. i borrowed the principle from the ChatGPT screener i set up for emails, which i described in the field guide on how a pathological liar gets defined by people who watch them long enough.

i am aware of how that sounds. i am aware that automating an answer is, in a different angle, a way to lie about who is answering. that is a debate i lost in advance. on balance, the screen kills more lies than it tells.

5. treatment four, the airpod meditation

the fourth treatment is the airpod meditation. i have one airpod. the second one was lost in 2023 in circumstances i refuse to revisit. that means binaural meditation, which the apps insist on, is theatre i can no longer afford. one airpod, ten minutes, the desk, the noise of the third floor through the ceiling.

the meditation is not silent. it is a guided one, narrated by a man who sounds like a kindergarten teacher who has lost his voice. he tells me to notice the next sentence i am about to say before i say it. that is the entire meditation. notice the sentence. decide if it is true. decide if it needs to be said. most do not survive the second question. the man with the kindergarten voice has done more for treatment for habitual lying than any of the longer pieces i read at 2 in the morning. you can find his style of show on a list of weird productivity series like the one i half-watched on an idiot abroad, which is unrelated and entirely related at once.

ten minutes. one airpod. one running list of unsaid sentences. the list is shorter than the said list, but it is growing, which is the only metric that matters.

6. treatment five, the bar with mike, off the books

the fifth treatment is mike. mike has a system for taxes. has not filed since 2019. his bar advice should be discounted accordingly. and yet. when i sit at the corner with mike at 9:08 on a thursday, mike does the one thing the journal can’t do. he listens, then he says nothing. silence is the cheapest treatment for habitual lying that has ever been invented. it costs the price of a beer and the discomfort of a man who is not impressed.

mike is not curious. that is his clinical advantage. when i tell him a thing that is partly true and partly invented, he doesn’t push, and he doesn’t agree. he absorbs it like a couch absorbs a cat. and somewhere between the second and third pint, the invented part of the story falls off because it has nothing to lean on. you cannot perform to a man who has not filed his taxes since 2019. there is no audience there. that is the whole point.

i looked into a more medical term for the pattern once, and the medical term sat on my desk for a week, untouched, because it had no bar to go to. mike is not a medical term. mike is the bar.

7. verdict, the treatment is the routine, with notes

the verdict is that treatment for habitual lying, on my desk, is five things that take ninety minutes a week, total. two-day journal, ninety-second fridge audit, contact form filtered by chatgpt, ten-minute airpod meditation, and one bar visit with mike that goes nowhere on purpose. none of them are clinical. all of them shorten the second column of the journal. that is the only number i trust.

the things i did not include: cold showers, gratitude lists, accountability partners, the apps that ping you on the hour. they are fine. they were not on my desk. the desk is the venue. the routines are the show. that is the treatment, with notes.

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