Seek uncomfortable truths
It's the only way to not be an NPC
I still remember that one Mother’s Day when I walked into Sephora with my mom.
A saleswoman was pitching her a $280 Chanel anti-aging serum when I glanced at the ingredient list: water, glycerin, and a tiny bit of Vitamin A marketed as a “retinol cream.” Tretinoin, available through an $80 prescription, outperforms nearly everything on those shelves. Its biggest flaw? It doesn’t come in a fancy black box.
I said nothing, obviously.
Not because I was dazzled by some fancy gold and black box, but because I understood what was actually happening. My mom wasn’t buying skincare. She was buying proof. A Chanel serum on her bathroom counter signalled to every Chinese auntie who came over that she had taste, that she’d made it, that the years of sacrifice it took to move our family overseas had finally paid off in ways you could see and touch. The serum wasn’t proof that the product worked. It was proof that life worked out.
I wasn’t about to burst her bubble on Mother’s Day. So I left with a gift bag and this familiar, uncomfortable feeling that kept showing up in business, friendships, and my intimate relationships.
3 months later, my mom complained to me about how she noticed no difference in her skin. I had this weird deja-vu moment, and all I could do was fake a smile and say “whelp, that’s life”.
In life, it’s often hard to tell what is real.
My mom’s Chanel serum was doing real emotional work. It made her feel seen, accomplished, and worthy. You can’t dismiss that by waving a truth serum in someone’s face and calling them irrational. The marketing of Chanel was serving her in ways the truth couldn’t. An unhealthy relationship that looks good on paper is providing stability, even if it’s built on a lie. The career that signals “I’ve made it” to family dinners is funding a stable lifestyle, even while it quietly burns you out.
The issue isn’t a lack of intelligence; it’s a lack of imagination. People stick with the comfortable version because they genuinely cannot picture what the alternative looks like. Leave the relationship… and then what? Quit the prestigious job… and become what? The lie persists because the truth requires killing your identity.
Objective truths vs social truths
When people say “just be real with me,” they almost always mean the safe kind. Caloric deficit causes weight loss. Pizza is better hot than cold. These cost nothing to accept, and no one ever gets in trouble for it.
The truths that actually matter are the ones tangled with identity: the realization that your art isn’t as valuable as you think. That you chose your partner out of fear rather than love. That your career is more about proving something to your friends than deep diving into the work you would actually find fulfilling. When you call this out, you notice that most people don’t just dispute the observation, they dispute your right to observe at all.
Listen to a friend explain why they can’t leave a situation they complain about every week. The reasons shift each time, but the conclusion never does. It’s the wrong time. They’re not ready. They wouldn’t even know where to start. At some point you realize they’re not describing obstacles. They’re describing a decision they’ve already made to stay, just dressed up in the language of being stuck.
What’s more, the deeper the lie sits, the less it even looks like a lie. At the personal level, you can at least sense you’re avoiding something. At the systemic level, you often can’t. It becomes institutionalized, giving it credibility, social proof, and its own vocabulary. School gets confused with education; Work gets confused with status.
When the truths are small (your friend has bad breath), the cost is awkwardness. When it’s personal (your career is a lie), it’s risky. But calling out a systemic inconsistency makes you strange, and being strange, socially, is worse than being wrong.
Maybe it’s easier to see this when you’re looking at another’s culture. In Japan, salarymen stay at the office until their boss leaves, not because the work demands it but because leaving first signals disloyalty. The crazy part is that much of what fills those hours isn’t building the company. It’s appeasing your boss’s ego. From here, that looks obviously broken. But we often only see the performance clearly when we’re not inside it.
Questioning the status quo is strange, and being strange, socially, is worse than being wrong.
Why pandering wins
Honesty is a terrible social strategy.
If you want to be liked, just agree with people. Reaffirm their questionable choices, tell them their instincts were sound, laugh at their jokes. You will never run out of friends. Pandering is the foundational skill behind every hit consumer brand, every popular social media account, every person you’ve ever described as “so easy to be around.” Truth-telling, by contrast, appeals only to the narrow slice of people who are already dissatisfied with comfortable lies. Which is not a large market.
The trippy part is that most people privately know this. Most people in a room will quietly disagree with whatever norm is being performed, but go along with it because they assume everyone else believes it. Nobody actually believes the thing. Nobody wants to be the first to say it. So the collective illusion holds, because silence is cheaper than honesty.
And this is what makes it hard to talk about: most of us are doing some version of this. Not scheming. Just presenting whichever version of ourselves gets the best response, and never really checking whether there’s anything underneath it. At a certain point the performance isn’t even dishonest anymore. It’s just who you’ve become, because nobody ever asked you to be anything else.
We do this because substance is expensive to evaluate and charm is free. Figuring out whether someone is actually competent, actually kind, actually worth trusting takes patience and the willingness to be wrong about your first impression. Charm asks nothing of you. It arrives pre-packaged and feels good immediately. So we’re not really being deceived. We’re being lazy. And laziness, repeated enough times, starts to look like preference.
I’m not above this. I’m a “tech founder”, and that word has been so hollowed out that I never refer to myself that way. When enough people perform ambition without the conviction behind it, the label stops meaning anything. There’s a sort of “performative showmanship” in the DNA of nearly every Silicon Valley startup these days.
The companies that actually last were built because someone saw something broken and couldn’t leave it alone. The money showed up because the work mattered. What you see more often now is the inverse: companies engineered to look like that from the outside, propped up by venture capital that functions more like a pump-and-dump than a bet on something real. The metrics pass at a glance. The story sounds right in a pitch deck. And nobody calls it out, because questioning someone’s sincerity is socially more expensive than just clapping along.
Who gets to tell the truth
The next weird observation is that even the ability to name a truth is often met with hypocrisy.
When AI replaces creative jobs like artists, it produces moral outrage. When AI replaces software engineers, they get the “adapt or get replaced, no one owes lamplighters a job” narrative. The principle is identical, but the sympathy isn’t. So much of what the public frames as “moral” is aligned with whoever currently holds romantic status in the cultural era rather than any consistent principle about dignity or labor.
Other times it’s about power. A founder who calls their industry broken goes viral on Twitter. An employee who says the same thing gets managed out. A wealthy person who says “money doesn’t buy happiness” is treated as wise. A poor person saying the exact same words is dismissed as coping. The observation doesn’t change. The permission to make it does.
These two forces often work together, and when they do, certain truths become essentially unsayable. Not because anyone banned them. But because no one with the cultural sympathy to be heard and the structural power to survive saying it has any incentive to.
That’s partly why I care about building something of my own. Not because success is the end goal, but because it buys the room to say the truth without being dismissed before the sentence is finished. Though you don’t always need that. Sometimes it’s a matter of communication style…
Humor as a weapon
There’s a reason I admire people with humor. Not humor as entertainment, but humor as a vehicle for truth. The same truths that get you ostracized as a statement can get you celebrated as a joke. And understanding this is the difference between being right and being heard.
Remember Muhammad Ali? He understood this better than almost anyone. He was saying things about race in America that would have gotten a less charismatic person destroyed (and in many ways, they tried to destroy him anyway). But his delivery made it survivable. He was funny, theatrical, and absurd. He’d say something devastating about the way Black Americans were treated and wrap it in so much personality that the audience was laughing before they realized what they’d just agreed with. He didn’t dilute the truth. He smuggled it past the part of people’s brains that would have rejected it on autopilot.
Chappelle, Carlin, all do this. So does every comedian who’s ever made a room full of people laugh at something they’d be furious about if you said it straight. The mechanism is laughter. It’s involuntary. It slips past your defenses before you’ve decided whether you agree, but by then the observation is already living rent-free in your conscience.
But laughter isn’t the only way in. Bruce Lee did something similar through a completely different door. He didn’t use jokes. He used mastery so undeniable that it forced people to take seriously the philosophy behind it. A Chinese man in 1960s Hollywood telling Americans their approach to martial arts was rigid and ego-driven would have been ignored or dismissed. But he could demonstrate it, physically, in a way that left no room for argument. The truth came packaged in competence so visible that the audience had no choice but to receive it.
Truth only becomes wisdom once the social cost disappears.
Here’s what people rarely notice in Ali’s example: the thing he was calling out, racism, is now broadly acknowledged. It’s socially safe to agree with him in retrospect. Everyone today can look back and proclaim “he was brave, he was right, he was ahead of his time.” That’s easy to say now. It costs nothing.
The harder question is: what are the Ali-level truths of today? What are the things that someone could say today, accurately, that would get the same reaction Ali got in 1967? Not the truths that were controversial sixty years ago and are now conventional wisdom, but the ones that are still too expensive to name.
My point is, they’re never obvious. Every era believes it has finally arrived at the correct set of values, and every era is wrong about something fundamental that the next generation will find obvious. Sadly this usually happens after great suffering, and the people who see it in real time are not rewarded for seeing it. They are punished in the same way every early truth-teller has always been punished: not with understanding, but with social exile. You’re never just wrong, you’re weird. You’re not just inaccurate, you’re bitter. You’re not just observing, you’re attacking and being cruel.
Jesus: “I came into the world to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”
“What is truth?” Pilate replied, then walked away.
— John 18:37-38
The truths that are most suppressed right now also don’t feel like suppressed truths. They feel like things that are simply not said, the same way nobody at Sephora calls out overpriced anti-aging creams. Not because it’s forbidden. Because the entire environment was setup so that saying it kills the mood, feels inappropriate, and self-censorship just feels like good manners and cultural fit.
When it comes to romantic partners, most people pick the person who feels familiar over the person who makes them grow. Not because they were fooled. Because they had a quiet signal and decided it was easier not to listen.
The same thing scales to every transaction we make. And it’s not as simple as “the manipulative business wins and the honest one loses.” Sometimes genuinely great and sincere products are just bad at presentation. It’s true, presentation genuinely matters, and you can’t blame people for responding to it. But that’s not where my problem is. Sometimes people choose a product that is worse by every measurable metric, just because it’s familiar. Just because their friends use it. Just because choosing the better, less-known alternative would require them to think for themselves, and thinking for themselves would mean admitting they’ve been settling. There’s a version of consumer behavior that isn’t about being fooled. It’s about choosing not to want more, because wanting more means questioning everything you’ve already accepted.
This is especially common in artistic communities, where being economically undervalued and feeling like your work is priceless creates a tension that only resolves if nobody wins. Someone else’s success either means they sold out or that the market was available all along and you just didn’t reach it.
The pattern is always the same. The charismatic ones who tell us what we want to hear gets our trust, our attention, our forgiveness when they screw up. The sincere ones have to fight uphill just to be taken seriously, because everything about how we’re culturally wired makes their message harder to deliver and harder to receive.
Often times people aren’t even choosing against them on purpose. They’re just being passive about who they believe. And that passivity lands disproportionately on the people who deserve to be taken seriously.
Then we turn around and wonder why everything feels hollow. Why the relationship lacked depth. Why every product is designed like a scam. Why the world has no more heroes. It’s not because the truth wasn’t available, but because we never went looking for it. We waited for sincerity to show up packaged in pretty black box with an easy-to-understand Chanel logo, and when it didn’t, we treated its absence as proof that everything was fine.
The truth comes to those who seek it
I keep coming back to that moment in Sephora. Not because my mom was wrong. In a way, she was right. The serum did exactly what she needed it to do, right up until it didn’t. That’s how every comfortable lie works. It functions perfectly until you ask it to do the one thing it was never designed for: hold up under honest scrutiny.
The uncomfortable part isn’t that we’re being deceived. It’s that we’re opting in. Choosing not to want more, because wanting more means questioning everything we’ve already accepted. The sincere partner, the blunt friend, the better product you’ve never heard of, none of them are going to chase you down. Truth doesn’t do marketing. It sits quietly and waits to be sought out, and seeking it means admitting you’ve been settling.
My mom’s serum eventually ended up in the back of her bathroom cabinet, half-used. She never mentioned it again. I think about that sometimes. Not the waste of money, but the silence after. How she just moved on to the next thing without ever circling back to ask why it didn’t work. How easy it was to just not think about it.
I think most of us have a bathroom cabinet like that. Full of things we quietly stopped believing in but never got around to throwing away.