How to tell when you are bullshitting yourself
This post is mainly about how to spot bullshitting in yourself (based on personal experience). Some of these points may apply to spotting it in others as well, but I always think it is best to focus on yourself and reduce the amount of bullshit you put out into the world. I will update this as I learn more about myself.
“Great question”. If someone asks you a question that you don't know the answer to and you respond with “great question’, and start rambling. Or sometimes you do know the answer, but you feel it isn’t impressive enough so you start adding lots of fluff. It’salways better to take time to think about the answer (the silence will be uncomfortable at first but you will get over it), say I don’t know or, just be honest and say the answer plain and true. Most people can tell when you are bullshitting, so it does you no favors to do this. Plus when you actually aren’t bullshitting it’ll make what you are saying less trustworthy.
“I can’t do this right now”. If you tell someone you want to do X, but provide reason after reason why you can’t do X right now, you are bullshitting yourself. Could be a number of reasons why but it’s usually because you are afraid of how difficult it could be and want to give yourself time to “prepare”. Or you simply don’t actually want to do the thing, you just like the response doing the thing gets.
Preparation. Most forms of “preparation” are bullshit. Following the example above, you may convince yourself that in order to do X, you need to do A, B, and C first. A common example is saying “I want to learn Y” and then spending your time reading blogs, attending talks, and doing non-interactive courses. When you eventually start doing Y, you almost always realize that all that prior prep was a waste of time. You mostly needed that time to hype yourself up and calm your nerves, which is fair, but there are less time-consuming ways to do this.
When your actions don’t align with your core facts. At some point in life, you develop facts about yourself. In my case, I know I have an obsession disorder (once I like something I will do it again & again e.g if I have a great piece of cake I will have it every day for a month.). So if I say “I am only going to have this cake once”, I know for sure I am lying, because it doesn’t match my facts. I have now written out a list of my facts and it has been very helpful when trying to change certain things about myself or achieve certain goals. To be extremely clear, I believe people can change and mold themselves to be whoever they want to be, but in accordance with core facts about themselves.
One is never “one” (with people, usually). If you say you will do something once, or you have found yourself doing something once (something you deem is a character flaw), it will usually happen again under the right conditions. Try to address it in the context of your core facts.
You rationalize why you not doing a certain thing was a good thing in the end. There is a good chance this is not true, you don’t know that for sure. It may hurt to accept that fact, but it’s better to address the regret in order to avoid making the same mistake again. Otherwise, you will trick yourself into not doing things and comfort yourself with the same rationalization.
Your gut says do one thing but you rationalize why you shouldn’t do it until you suppress the feeling. This usually looks like asking lots of different people’s opinions on the said thing. You’ll usually select people you know don’t care enough (so will buy into your argument), don’t know you enough or people easily convinced.
When someone corrects you (argument, debate, teaching) and you start responding in a rapid, more aggressive manner. At this point, you probably don’t really believe whatever point you are arguing, but you just don’t like the feeling of being embarrassed. The other person may also start to take some delight in being “right”, knowing they’re “right” and seeing you act all flustered. Best to just say “you are right” even if you don’t believe it at the time. The power imbalance is immediately removed, the person usually just wants to move on as they no longer get the satisfaction from proving that they are right, and by the time you calm down, you will feel very thankful that you didn’t act a fool.
“I actually don’t want this” you do. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have given it that much thought, much less be discussing it (with yourself or others).
When you think you sound smart and fancy. You are probably overcomplicating something to impress someone, and in the process bullshitting yourself and others. Again, people can tell. This usually comes from a place of insecurity, so work on the core problem of being more secure.