Oprisa's Journal

 Have We Turned Lying Into a Social Agreement?

There’s something strangely familiar about the way we talk to each other today. We circle around what we truly want to say, we dilute our opinions until they’re barely recognizable, and sometimes we let silence pretend it’s an answer. No one taught us to do this. There was no official moment when society gathered and decided: From this day on, honesty will be optional.

Which leads to a harder question:

Have we unintentionally turned lying into a social agreement?

• People lie less to deceive and more to keep interactions predictable and conflict-free.

 • Honesty is no longer a default; it’s something we negotiate, depending on the room we’re in.

 • Modern social norms reward being agreeable rather than being truthful.

 • We learn early that discomfort is dangerous, while small lies are socially safe.

 • Gradually, we come to expect others to play along with this comfort-first version of reality — and they expect the same from us.

Kindness or Avoidance?

Many of the lies we tell look polite on the surface. We avoid saying something that might hurt someone’s feelings. We understate, soften, or simply pretend not to notice. We convince ourselves it’s kindness even when it’s avoidance.

The Performance of Being “Fine”

Social media has turned life into a performance with a fixed aesthetic. Messy truths don’t photograph well. And when everyone else is curating their lives into polished fragments, telling the unfiltered truth starts to feel like an interruption rather than an act of sincerity.

Honesty as a Risk Calculation

Before speaking honestly, we run an internal algorithm:

Will this make things uncomfortable? Will they misunderstand me? Will this complicate the relationship?

And by the time the mental processing is done, the truth often comes out reshaped, softened or not at all.

The Group Punishes the Outlier

The person who says the uncomfortable truth is rarely celebrated. Instead, they’re labeled as “too direct,” “too harsh,” or “too much.” Not because they’re wrong, but because they break the rhythm of mutual denial that keeps everything smooth.

Institutions Teach Us Early

Families teach us to keep the peace. Schools reward “appropriate behavior.” Workplaces value diplomacy. Slowly, we learn that honesty comes second, stability comes first.

The Daily Cost of Telling the Truth

There’s a strange kind of price you pay when you allow yourself to be honest. It’s not a one-time cost; it feels more like a daily subscription. Every conversation becomes a small test: Do I say what I truly think, or do I choose the version of myself that others find easier to digest?

And each time you choose honesty, you pay something awkward silence, tension, misinterpretation, or even the subtle distance that appears when someone didn’t want the truth after all.

What’s paradoxical is that none of us claim to respect liars. We say we want truth, transparency, authenticity. Yet the moment we hear an honest answer we don’t like, the liar becomes strangely attractive not because we admire dishonesty, but because we prefer the comfort it brings.

This creates a social bubble: a shared illusion in which everyone agrees to avoid the truths that might disrupt the collective peace. If you subscribe to that bubble, you’re welcomed. If you don’t, you stand outside it not punished, necessarily, but marked as someone who complicates things simply by refusing to play along.

The more consistently honest you are, the more obvious the daily subscription fee becomes.

A Real-Life Examples

One of the clearest ways to see how we treat honesty differently depending on who delivers it is to look at children. Imagine a five-year-old listening to you talk and suddenly saying, with total innocence: “You’re talking nonsense.”

You would probably laugh. You’d assume it’s cute, unfiltered, harmless. You wouldn’t take it personally because children don’t yet know the social rules about softening the truth. They just see things as they are and say them out loud.

But if that same kid grows up, and at twenty says the exact same thing, the reaction is completely different. Suddenly it’s not “cute” it’s rude, disrespectful, abrasive. Even if what they said is just as true as before, we no longer treat it as honesty. We treat it as attitude. As a problem.

What changed? Not the truth.

What changed is our tolerance for honesty. We accept truth only when it comes wrapped in innocence. When it comes from an adult, unfiltered, it becomes uncomfortable and we quickly label the person as difficult.

This shows something important:

We don’t dislike honesty.

We dislike honesty that challenges us.

And that’s exactly how we slowly end up valuing comforting illusions more than uncomfortable truths.

When the truth becomes negotiable, trust becomes fragile. Not broken, just… thinner. Conversations continue, but they lose depth. Relationships persist, but feel strangely hollow. Decisions get made, but no one is fully sure what anyone actually believes.

We end up living in a world where everyone talks, but few people speak where we protect comfort more fiercely than connection. And the tragedy is that without even noticing, we start to prefer illusions over clarity, and convenience over authenticity.

If this unspoken agreement to avoid the truth has become the norm, then choosing honesty isn’t just a personal decision it’s an act of quiet rebellion.

So the question becomes:

Do we still want the truth, or have we grown too comfortable with the subscription-based version of reality?

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Thanks for reading.

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📬 Until next time,

— The Macro Scratch team.