This is totally me. I’m the type of person whom pathological liars must love, because it would not occur to me to doubt them.
It is for this reason that stories like the OP are intriguing to me. Lying is hard for me to pull off without a great deal of planning and concentration. So anytime I hear about people lying effortlessly, about stuff of zero consequence, a part of me is as amazed as I am when I hear about impressive memories and savant-like mental math.
I sympathize with anyone who has a loved one who is like this, though. I’d probably have to kill them.
I’m as honest as the day is long, to a fault sometimes. It took a while but now I can say little white lies with a straight face, to smooth day to day relationships and keep things ticking along. I’ve got as far as being able to make up a previous situation, to ‘present’ an alternative view to someone who’s making a bad decision.
For example I see someone eating too much fast food, and clearly don’t know eating KFC, McD’s, Burger King etc every day is not a good way to live very long. So I’ll tell them some scary statistics I know and maybe embellish them with a personal story to make the memory of our conversation stick. The story would be a friend who regularly ate fast food and had a heart attack at 34, had blood tests and the doctors told him he’d die before he reached 40 unless he changed his eating plan. So he did and has run 3 half marathons, raising x amount of money for x charity.
So the lies aren’t about me, they’re for the general good and I don’t feel I’m betraying anyone’s trust. I imagine pathological liars also have some sort of internal mechanism that they feel ‘justifies’ doing what they do, but that mechanism is seated in a very different place.
For example, I’ve been teaching in the Middle East now for five years. The lies, as a teacher, I’ve heard are constant, ‘sincere’ and well-practiced. It’s usually how a student should be given a break for being late (traffic accident, teacher! / my wife is in hospital, teacher!) or how they should be given better grades (the spelling isn’t important, we didn’t learn about ‘Sam’ the businessman, my iphone broke, I was tired etc).
Morally some don’t see the difference between stating your legitimate case and making up shit. I sort of understand, given my fast food example above; we’re all able to lie, just the reasons we do so are disagreed upon.
Recently I met a Korean woman who claimed that her brother was a billionaire who said he was going to take care of her, but he died suddenly before he change his will and that’s why she was now working at a minimum wage job. Oh, and her daughter was married to a millionaire accountant, but she didn’t want to move to the city they were living in.
I did some internal eye-rolling, but I kept my mouth shut.
I think there are also cultural differences towards lying. For instance, I know Chinese people who distinguish between “real” lying and making up a story to save face or make a relationship run more smoothly.
Oh yeah, saving face by lying is chronic in China. If you don’t know then just make up shit. They do try to help out, but ‘Sorry, I don’t know - ask someone else’ isn’t in their vocabulary. In Arabia it’s similar but different, if you ask for something it’s always ‘Insha’Allah’, it’ll happen in the next few days (schway schway), God willing. But the ‘Insha’Allah’ can be slow, fast, with a noticeable pause (Insha…‘Allah’), with a hint of eye roll or just put out there as in ‘I’ve no fucking clue’.
OMG my roommate freshman year in college was like this. The stuff he did before he was 18 was truly amazing. He had been a scuba diver on oil rigs off the coast of Libya, and had also been on Jacques Cousteau’s crew. He had flown air rescue helicopters, as well as airliners for TWA. He and his older brother would regularly take joyrides on diesel locomotives left idling overnight. After a while everyone would just roll their eyes when he started in on another story.
By the way, have I ever told you people about my wife, Morgan Fairchild? Whom I’ve slept with…
I had a guy do this to me a couple times a week for a year at my last job. I always knew he was full of shit and I would just nod and play along just to see what shit he would come up with next, it was kind of fun, but the day he told me he shot 3 guys in the face in self-defense was when it was explicitly clear I should never believe a word this guy says.
I use to feel very insulted that they would think I was stupid enough to believe these lies, but then I realized they told this same lie to everyone, because when I would talk with others they knew the liar they would complain about the same thing. So it was like a rehearsed performance, as if he had written a one-man play and was reciting it to everyone he knew.
It must be a creative skill to be able to come up with a lie on the spot like that. Also to memorize their lies and keep track of what they told to who. Sounds like an incredible amount of overhead. I worked with a guy who didn’t do any work, and would create this reports to show progress in different ways to cover for the fact he wasn’t doing anything. I found the whole thing mind-boggling what he would go through to produce these reports sometimes spending three days on them. I personally found it easier to do the actual work and report it correctly than what he was doing.
Having a family member lie like this would be the worst, because you either have to go along with their BS or just not talk with them.
Well, if a woman asks if you think this dress she is wearing makes he look fat, it’s better to lie and say it looks fine. Lie to scare someone to do the right thing, I think those all have good intentions. But making up stuff just to cause drama are harmful lies and damage relationships. I can’t think of anything more insulting than someone who simply didn’t believe what I was saying, but to these liars it doesn’t appear to concern them at all.
I tune it out, mostly. I have a friend who I think lies, but the reason I think that is, she will start some tale about something that happened to her recently–within the last couple of days, or even on the morning of the day when she’s telling me the tale in the afternoon–and she will keep interrupting herself to change the story. It’s like she’s editing it as she goes to get the best story, but it’s tedious because it takes so damn long. And it’s really mundane. And it’s not like the story really hinges on whether she went to the bank first or the liquor store first, or oh, wait, no, first she talked to her mother-in-law, then she went to the library. Other than that it doesn’t really bother me.
I also have a family member whose entire conversation is stories in which he becomes the hero! He turns out to be the smartest, wiliest, strongest, etc. Okay. I find those a little boring, too, even if they’re true, but not all of them are. Tune out.
If they’re telling a story, and it’s a good story, I don’t care if it’s a lie. These are not the stories I am talking about here.
There was this guy I worked with in IT many years ago who was like that, that when things at work were getting stressful would tell us that this old company he worked with that was far away called to offer him a job at a high salary. He would claim that he was needed there because he was the only one that was an expert on the very old mainframes they were using. In reality, the company he was referring to was a leading technology company and they didn’t have this old hardware and operating system in existence anymore. I asked him “Why don’t you take the job?” and he said he didn’t want to have to move. This guy was noticeable when he was telling this kind of lie because he would get this look on his face like when a little kid is telling a lie.
At the time, I was so sick of him telling that story to all of us, I almost wanted to call him on it. But I got another job and didn’t have to listen to this nonsense anymore.
It was clear to me, this guy felt useless in his current job, didn’t like having to deal with the newer technology and might have felt like king of the castle back in his old company where he was familiar with the work and knew his stuff. He was wishing for the glory days. While I found it annoying to hear the story I actually felt sorry for him.
Sometimes if you hear the story from other people the liar told it to over time, you get different versions of it too.
I lived near this family for a long time. This guy claimed when he was a child his mother beat him with a belt. Then later on said his mother locked him in a closet. Then the story in his final version became which he told to his children “my mother beat me with a belt and locked me in a closet”. I knew these people for a long time, so I said to the liar’s son when he repeated this to me, I said none of it was true. He said “How do you know?”. I said "Because I’ve been in their house and there are no locks on closets. Have you ever seen a home which you could lock the closet? Besides that house only has sliding door closets. You can’t lock someone in a closet, that’s something they show in old movies.
I get really uncomfortable around the kind of lying as described in the OP. Lying for personal benefit, even if I don’t condone it, I understand it.
People who just make shit up for a good story to tell, I don’t understand that at all. What really makes me crazy is people who take your story and try to one-up it, when they have no idea about what your talking about.
I recently worked with a guy who tried to tell me that the US Army (he was definitely in the Army) sent him down 300 feet underwater off the coast of Alaska with a wetsuit and a bottle of regular atmospheric gas. When I questioned a wetsuit and explicitly asked about a drysuit, he changed his story, but really?
The whole conversation started because I was talking about a recent diving trip. I’m not an expert diver, but I do dive. You obviously don’t even have the most basic understanding of diving because people don’t dive to 300 feet on a single bottle of atmospheric gas. I mean, there may be a few dumbasses who have and lived to tell the tale, but the US Army isn’t going to sanction that kind of dumb-fuckery.
I might call bullshit on that kind of lying if it was some blowhard at the bar, but how can you do that with some guy you have to work with every day? I just ignored it and him as much as possible after that.
Filing this under insufferable cultural norms. I don’t mind if people don’t know the answer, because the rational thing to do next is help me find an alternative way to find it. That can’t be done if you are lying or dismissing the issue.
I wonder how this works in a professional environment. I ask my Chinese colleague the answer to a problem and he makes stuff up?