They played Ricky Gervais’s movie The Invention of Lying (2009) on the flight back from Caracas. It wasn’t as good as I expected it to be, but something stuck with me: the "true" world was so devastatingly unhappy.
Leave aside the Biblical references, and the obvious explanation for people to have something to believe in, therefore the worshipping of a god, and just look at the contrast between a happy and an unhappy existence.
If everybody said what was on their minds, would we all be miserable? We could all relate to the "true" statements in the movie: homes are nothing but sad places where old people are abandoned by their loved ones, we do think the person we are out on a date with is a total loser, we do think about what our kids would look like were we to marry an unattractive person (although not as much as Anna, played by Jennifer Garner, seemed to have), and we do feel happy when someone lies to our face, because they are saying exactly what we want to hear. That little lie can make your day and give you hope that things will be fine.
I don’t believe that humans are so pessimistic, though. In that sense, I disagree with the premise of the movie. I think that we all have our optimistic and our pessimistic side, and if we all set out to say exactly what was on our minds, we would evolve into beings that balance out the good and the bad. We would probably speak our minds a lot more than we do nowadays to say the good things. We are just so used to putting on a front, that we think our true selves must be pessimistic, miserable and hateful monsters. But that’s not so.
The monster inside of me tells me every day that I’m not good enough, that I hate my job and I’m too much of a chicken to do anything about it, that I’m short and fat, that I’m a bad friend, that I will never be happy. If I only listened to the monster, I would be even more depressed than those people in the movie. But what keeps me going is the energetic and optimistic side of me, who tells me how good a life I have made for myself, how smart I am, how generous I am, how pretty and so NOT fat I am, and what a great wife, sister and daughter I am.
Studies show that we listen to negative feedback much more intently than we do positive. This is not because we only see ourselves negatively, on the contrary, it is because we DO believe the positive, and may think that anything that’s not news doesn’t count as feedback. Let me tell you right now: if we did not have an equally strong positive side, we would have all given up on life years ago.
So maybe it’s time to give your positive side a voice. Stop drowning it. Kick the monster’s ass for 60 seconds, and ask yourself: what is my positive side telling me about myself to balance out the negative?
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