Countering the 10 Most Toxic Lies of Modern Life

To the best of my knowledge, this tweet is not the result of some comprehensive survey or discussion among philosophers, it’s just someone’s list of the toxic lies of modern life. Still, it’s a good list – and yes, these are all toxic lies. The more you believe them, the more likely you are to have a painful, unhappy life.

That being said, the difficulty with refuting all of these toxic lies is that you could practically write a whole book on each one. So, it’s really not possible to comprehensively address every tiny nuance of each argument, but can we at least point out the opposite argument? Oh yes, we can.

1) There’s no meaning to life: Not only does every life potentially have meaning but finding that meaning is one of the keys to having a fulfilling life. Maybe it’s being a good wife and mothering your children, maybe it’s serving your congregation as a pastor, making a more beautiful world, writing a novel or play that millions enjoy, building a farm and feeding people, making a better laundry detergent, being the best janitor in the company, getting humanity to Mars or feeding hopeless people no one else cares about at a soup kitchen.

Everyone has a different purpose and a different level of impact, but all of us, you included, have some niche great or small to fill. Something that makes us want to get up in the morning. Something that will make the world a better place in our own way. It’s part of how we’re built and eventually, no matter how idyllic your life may be, if you don’t have this element of it, if you don’t see any meaning in it, you won’t have a fulfilling life.

2) Max pleasure is the goal: No, max pleasure is not the goal. Max meaning is the goal. Max growth is the goal. Maximizing your potential is the goal.

If you pack your life with pleasure from dusk till dawn, it’ll be fun for a while, but pleasure is ultimately empty. Pleasure is supposed to be the fun little pace change that happens in between meaningful activities while pushing ourselves to be better and doing real work.

When you overload on pleasure, you lose your capacity to endure hardship, you become bored, and you can easily become jaded and degenerate. Pleasure is a little like desert. When you try to make it the main course, you get sick of it in a hurry and then sick as a person if you keep doing it because that’s not how your life is supposed to be.

3) Career ahead of family: There is a time and a place to put everything you have into your career, but there’s a big price to be paid for doing that for too long. There’s a reason why career-focused women ending up alone with cats and husbands spending so many hours at the job supporting their families that their wife leaves them are cliches at this point. Ultimately, most people are going to be happier if they put their family ahead of their career. Being the district manager and having a happy family at home that wants to be around you is ultimately going to be worth a lot more to you than putting in an extra 15 hours per week to make it to regional manager. There’s nothing wrong with doing that if you can, but ultimately, family just means more than work.

4) Tradition has no value: Tradition is the lived human experience of your ancestors. It’s their way of saying, “This is what worked in the real world and made life better for people.” That doesn’t mean a tradition shouldn’t ever be changed or that we shouldn’t have new traditions, but there is no human being as wise as the lived experience of generations of our ancestors.

We can say, “That sounds like a good idea.” However, they also got to say that, but then they got to see those ideas implemented, got to watch how it played out in the real world, sometimes for decades at a time and we get the benefit of that via tradition. It’s a good deal and if anything, most people dramatically underestimate the value of tradition to their lives and their society.

5) Children are a burden: There’s no question that children are expensive, time-consuming, and aggravating, so why do people keep having them? Because the juice is worth the squeeze.

You can go all the way back to the beginning of the human race and from there, to now, you have a line of ancestors that had kids. You are the fruit of a tree that has its roots dug into eternity and what? Do you think you’re going to break that chain and be happier for it? Do you think you’re never going to hear a child say, “I love you mommy” or play catch with your son and you’re going to have a BETTER life because of it? What naivete. What arrogance. What foolishness!

6) Marriage is pointless: It is admittedly harder than ever to get married and have a successful marriage, while it’s you’re more likely to get divorced than you would have been in the past. Many of the criticisms of what’s gone wrong with the institution of marriage in modern America are completely legitimate.

Yet and still, studies show that married people are happier than single people. Happily married people are happier than single people and there’s no question that a married mom and dad do an order of magnitude better job of raising kids than a single parent. I can’t tell you that marriage is a panacea, but I can tell you having a happy marriage is a life goal worth pursuing for almost everyone that isn’t too narcissistic to deal with sharing their life with another human.

7) Religion is worthless: Not only do studies consistently show that Christians are happier than atheists and agnostics, but Christianity creates a definitive moral structure for the universe, a sense of purpose, and the possibility of being forgiven for being such an awful person – and let’s be honest, we’re all awful people on some level.

I can’t control what people believe, but if you asked me whether someone would be more likely to be happy, successful, and have a good life if they were a Christian or an atheist/agnostic, the answer would clearly be the Christian.

8) Money = happiness: Up to a certain point, more money does mean more happiness because it removes a lot of the obvious pains and anxiety that can be caused by a lack of money.

If you’re driving a beater that breaks down every other week and you don’t know if you can pay your rent, more money probably will make you happier. But, beyond that? The research is varied with older studies showing not so much and newer studies contradicting that a bit.

However, the older studies are more likely to be proved right over time because happiness doesn’t really scale up based on how cool the adult toys you can buy are. Instead, it’s more reliant on things like growth, purpose, and connection that aren’t necessarily tightly tied to money.

We could all name impossibly rich celebrities who killed themselves or overdosed because they needed something to dull the pain. If money really bought happiness Elvis, Amy Winehouse, John Belushi, Robin Williams, Michael Jackson, and so many other household names wouldn’t have died before their time.

9) Government cares: Government is full of people and those people, like most people, primarily care about themselves. They care about their paycheck, their benefits, and in the case of politicians, their power and status.

If anything, the sort of power-hungry narcissist and skilled con man that’s drawn to political office in modern America probably cares LESS about their fellow citizens than the average person. In fact, they’re probably pretty comparable to the sort of people we see in prisons, except they have a slightly higher IQ, better-connected families, and more Ivy League pals.

Government is interested in serving the government and politicians are interested in serving politicians. If you, their constituents, or the country gets helped in the process, great, but almost universally they’d rather put a dollar in their own pockets than a $1,000 in yours.

This country was extremely fortunate to be founded at a rare moment in history when more selfless, intellectual men found themselves in charge, but we have regressed to the mediocre mean and then some.

10) Solution = a pill: America’s healthcare system is overly influenced by the pharmaceutical industry. Some of the drugs that the industry has brought to the world are truly miraculous, but many others are just great ways to mask symptoms, and a significant percentage of other drugs are just ethically dubious cash cows.

However, the primary problem American medicine has is that it’s very much focused on targeting symptoms, not root causes. Do you have a problem? You take a drug to fix it. If that drug causes a problem? Take another drug to fix that problem. If that’s not working for you? Maybe you need a new drug.

Meanwhile, you may see a dozen doctors per year without one of them asking, “Why are you having this problem in the first place and what can you do to address the root cause of it?” If I broke my arm or needed heart surgery, there’s no place in the world I’d rather go than an American hospital, but if you’re chronically ill, you want to become healthy and a drug isn’t going to fix your problem, you’re pretty unlikely to ever find the solution to that problem in the American medical system.

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