The Trobriand people, living on an archipelago far off the toasty east coast of Papua New Guinea, are highly attuned to bullshit. I assume this because they have a word—native to their spoken language of Kilivila—that describes the things that are known to be true, but definitely not spoken about. So I guess what they are really attuned to is camouflaged bullshit. Camoshit, let’s call it.

Mokita is the word for these shushed truths.

It’s hard to broach the “everyone knows it’s the truth”-truth, even when it leads to awkwardness, settling, and disconnection. It’s more convenient to gloss over the truth sometimes, isn’t it?

• It’s easier to not talk to your friend about her “rosé all day” (and night) drinking habit.
• It’s easier to not talk to your mom about how she maybe shouldn’t be driving these days.
• It’s easier to not talk to your colleague about how he’s not “good enough” to be in front of the big clients.
• It’s easier to not talk to your son about his Hot Pocket-induced weight gain.
• It’s easier to not talk to your boss about her cockamamie questionable Q4 strategy.
• It’s easier to not talk to your husband about why he’s so into pickleball all of a sudden (more specifically, his attractive teammate named Margie.)
• The. List. Goes. On.

We engage in what’s known as a polite fiction—that social construct where all parties involved are aware of the truth (you, your husband, Margie, the entire pickleball league) but opt to maintain a facade for the sake of social grace… and to avoid the prickly feelings of conflict.

This gif sums it up best:

LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA MOKITA

Thinking of getting these for my dad? Don’t.

Funny sidebar: every Christmas, for like 40 years in a row, we’d give my dad Toffifee candy because he loved it and he was so happy to open it up and it became a ritual and life was jolly good. All was good until a few years ago, when I learned that he really didn’t like Toffifee at all—not one toffee-filled bit. The polite fiction jig was up! Maybe I should give him some this Christmas, since he forgets what he doesn’t like these days😳?)

Mokitas are fascinating when they show up between people… relationships, families, teams, communities. And despite this long buildup, I don’t care about the mokitas you share between other people right now. For today’s chat, I’m more interested in the truths about ~yourself~ you might be gliding past for the sake of “keeping the peace with the status quo”… the polite fictions you might be maintaining with yourself… just to not rock the boat.

Where would you place yourself on my Spectrum of Lies You Tell Yourself Just to Make It Through Your Days? (Your nights are up for debate.)

🔪Brutal honesty (emphasis on brutal)

🔪Healthy policy of truth

🔪Not self-aware enough to lie to yourself

🔪Wee little fibs (fiblets!) “as required”

🔪Can’t be trusted as far as you can be thrown

🔪Suffering from alethophobia (fear of the truth)

🔪Dirty rotten liar

🔪Full-blown pathological liar (all crazy-eyed)

(So now we run into the conundrum of whether to believe the answer you just gave, what with
you being a liar and all. Let’s just assume you lied about the answer you gave and keep reading.)

It’s okay: you come by this self-deception tendency honestly. You’re operating as a healthy human if you try to shield yourself from truths that might bring you down/ break your stride/ crush your soul/ tamper with your ego/ ignite conflict/ cause you to fall off the wagon.

We do a bang-up job of protecting ourselves from our feelings. Should we marvel (momentarily) about how determined and fierce and apt we are at tap dancing around unflattering/ itchy/ harsh self-truths?

Self-deception is our brain’s version of hitting “snooze”—a little denial here, a rationalization there, all in the name of emotional comfort. Remember cognitive dissonance theory from Psych 101? The more our actions misalign with our beliefs, the more mental gymnastics we perform to feel okay.

We fabricate illusions about our realities to stay safe and snuggly in comfort zones that’ll just end up snuffing the life out of us anyways.

Self-deception motivates us to pay selective attention to things or engage in biased information searches. By way of example, a couple of years ago The Husband was huffing and puffing up a small storm of cigars in the backyard. (I said nothing about his cancer-inviting habit, BECAUSE MOKITAS, but deep down he knew I was curious about how long it would take for him to die of esophageal cancer.) He found a rather favorable article about how cigar smoking wasn’t *that* bad, called his exhaustive research process to a halt, and fired up a Cohiba. (He only smokes a cigar every month or so now, so the smoking mokita has been temporarily extinguished.)

• I ignore my cholesterol issues as I order pork belly like it’s going out of style (please, chefs, don’t let pork belly go out of style. I love a good pork-belly-flavored-mokita). I’d rather avoid the truth than adjust my diet.
• I know a woman who is choosing to ignore her shopping addiction—an addiction that causes her to struggle with her mortgage payments. She came clean about it one evening after two cocktails and now, in the sober light of day, laughs it off with “we all buy things we don’t need from Amazon” comments. She’d rather maintain the mokita with herself than get the help she needs.
• A former client knows he’s tired of his 18-year career and wants to start his own thing, but white-lies himself to sleep with the notion that “the job isn’t that bad and the pay is good.” The “Isn’t That Bad” mokita is a sneaky bugger.
• A woman I met at a recent workshop suspected she was clinically depressed, but didn’t want to visit her doctor for an official diagnosis. “I’d rather live in a world where I might not be medically sad, and I get to avoid the truth if I don’t see my GP.”
• “I’m putting my head in the sand about retirement,” admitted another participant at the same event. “I think I need to move on—make way for the younger folks who are better at this than I am now, but I don’t want to admit that I’m past my expiration date. I don’t want to face the truth of what retirement looks like for me. I can fake it for a few more years.”

Want to stop lying to yourself? Start by noticing the discomfort. That squirmy feeling is usually your Self-Bullshitometer kicking into rusty gear. Get curious. Ask, “What am I avoiding?” Bust yourself, admit you’re scared/ unsure of what’s next, accept how normal that is, and then face the music.

The truth can sting, sure, but it also liberates. You are allowed to flinch as you acknowledge what’s really going on in your life. Trust that after opening up a can of worms in your life, you’ll figure out what to do with the worms.

Should we take a trip to the Trobriand Islands? They eat worms there (for real, I looked it up). We could put a stake in our self-deceptions in the morning, then go for a snorkel after lunch.