I dunno, "lies we tell ourselves" doesn't sound like a very good essay.

Since we don't know about the lies we tell ourselves, it would have to be "lies I see other people telling themselves".

And that pretty much translates to "Things that other people believe that I disagree with", which is a fairly boring topic for an essay.

When's the last time you had an honest discussion with anyone about:

a) Sex (e.g., Do you satisfy your partner?) b) Death (e.g., Was your life meaningful?) c) Formal Education (e.g., If not, then what?) d) Identity (e.g., Who are you?) e) Authority (e.g., Who tells you what to do?)

I don't know, honesty seems much harder than settling on lies to tell ourselves.

I have these kinds of discussion fairly often. In fact, I probably wouldn't consider somebody a friend until we'd had that kind of conversation. I find it hard to judge if that's unusual - maybe it is in other social circles?

I take the point that avoiding self-deception is hard, maybe impossible. But that's no different from talking about science, or history, or just about anything else.

That self-deception is exactly what I was getting at. I have no doubt that many have these discussions but it's so much easier to lie during them. I'd argue it's different in kind from science or history exactly because there's no independent record that can be consulted. Indeed, I can't see many parents lying to their kids about science or history because it would be so straight-forward to identify the lie. No, the lies seem much more personal exactly because we're already telling them to ourselves. Thus the sequel essay.

ah, in that case I do agree - and we're talking about something that huge swathes of philosophers, psychologists, social scientists and miscellaneous intellectuals have spent their lives arguing about.

That isn't to deny that a pg contribution could be illuminating!

I recently found this forum and I am very happy I did. It is nice to see a threads of discussion end in agreement. That doesn't seem possible in many other places.

I'd guess most of the top 10 start with "I don't have time for X", for many values of X.

If you don't have time for something, it just means you didn't make time for it. Despite what you think, it's not that valuable to you because you don't choose to do it.

I realized that by not exercising, I was explicitly saying my health or energy level were not important. Since that's just plain dumb, I started going to the gym 3x/week, and I'm going to start biking again soon.