038 • Why the truth will set you free

Being truthful.

It’s easy to it’s something you should do, but less easy to embody.

It doesn’t feel nice to tell someone you don’t want to upset that they could do something better. It’s hard to hurt somebody’s feelings in the present, even if it leads to greater progression in the future.

But you must pursue truth in everything that you do. Because it’s…well…it’s truth. It’s what’s right.

The idea of toxic compassion from Chris Williamson is very accurate - people will tell you what they think will make you happier, even if it damages your development and improvement in the long run...​

The classic example is telling a clinically obese person that they can do what they want with their body even if their current health habits are likely to send them to an early grave.

On the other hand, when you’re told the truth, the map of reality in your head becomes more accurate with time.

Your sense of self is not warped from people telling you falsehoods and you gain a more realistic understanding of who you are and where you can channel your efforts to become a better person.

But how do you actually live closer to the truth? It’s a very broad directive, although I’ve come up with a couple of things that have helped me up to this point.

Number one seems a little obvious, but speak the truth.

It’s surprising how powerful this is. We’re often tempted to not tell the whole truth, or just to be plain deceiving, but this tricks your own mind as much as that of who you’re aiming to placate or deceive.

When you stop telling the truth you signal to your mind that you’re not a person of your word. You end up finding it a lot harder to convince yourself to do the right things when it’s time to show up and put in the work.

Your self-belief diminishes because you don’t know whether you can stand by your morals, even losing track of what they are. This is when you start to fall down the trap of investing in the opinions of others who have a stronger sense of self-belief than you do.

The second thing you can do is try and make your own decisions based on experiences. This beats being the kind of person who builds opinions based on what strangers and faceless authorities have told them.

There’s no point buying into every mainstream opinion because it’s mainstream. Many people do this, following the leader as though they haven’t been blessed with an operational brain inside their skulls.

However, there’s no point just going against every mainstream opinion either. These people can be even worse because they think they’re being high-agency and alternative when in truth they’re the same kind of brainless, just with an ego.

The best way to gain real opinions about things is to learn and experience, which will in turn lead to understanding. I don’t throw out bold opinions on things that I don’t understand.

If I’m forced, I’ll proffer some thoughts whilst making it clear that I don’t have a high level of knowledge in the subject area.

Reserve your judgment of the world until you have experience or opinions.

The last piece of advice that I can give for living closer to the truth is to journal and meditate. I know this advice is very cliché, but I’m going to explain how it works…

Both help you leave behind the warped perspective of reality that you have inside your head and see things a little clearer for how they really are.

Meditation helps you live in the present moment by increasing your mindfulness. And since the present is all we have, this is a lot closer to truth than thinking about what has happened or what might happen.

Journaling can help you view your life a little more objectively. When emotional or overwrought, you can write down what’s bothering you - often, seeing those words written on paper shows more of the truth of your situation rather than what’s in your head.

That brings us to the end of my tips for living a little closer to the truth.

Try them out! I hope you’ll notice the friction that diminishes now that you’re not subscribed to a people-pleasing, mainstream-accepting, misled existence.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next week!

---

What I've written this week...

​Workspaces - A Powerful Obsidian Workflow Enhancer - I've been investigating the core plugins again in Obsidian, seeing if I can make them a little more productive. First I published a piece about Workspaces and how this core plugin can help with context-switching. I also investigated the Obsidian Graph View, which used to think was unproductive. You can read about how I now use it through this link.