On the day of this writing, during my 45 minute morning commute, I was thinking about two people on the periphery of my life who are extremely insincere. Some relationships are not of your choosing. Rather, they are thrust upon you, and you just have to cope with them as best you can.
If anything, I am too sincere. That’s a problem, too. If I feel something, I put it out there, for better or worse. Sometimes that gets me into trouble. Sometimes I shock or frustrate people. But they usually know that I say what I mean and I mean what I say. To behave otherwise would be entirely too confusing.
Because of this, I’m utterly befuddled by insincere people. If you say one thing and then do another, I’m left wondering why you simply didn’t state your intentions in the first place. Why waste time with pretty words that have no meaning?
What constantly astounds me about insincere people is that they must genuinely believe that they have everyone fooled or they wouldn’t continue down that twisted road. In fact, insincerity is easy to spot by most people. Either your body language isn’t matching your actual language, or you’ve demonstrated that you actually feel the opposite about things by your past behavior. You seem to have failed to realize that most people learned to pretend and can therefore spot it in others by the time they’ve attended preschool.
I believe that most insincere people have very little knowledge of themselves or others. If they’re not making a conscious effort to be disingenuous, if it comes naturally to them, then they must have started believing their own pretense long ago, and therefore they feel sincere to themselves. Honestly, I don’t know which is worse. But if you’re often told that you can’t be counted upon and/or trusted, here’s a clue: That’s most likely due to your insincerity.
Nobody is perfect. We’ve all said, “Nice to meet you,” for example, when in fact we couldn’t care less. But when that kind of behavior becomes a lifestyle, people will start to actively loathe you.
It must be strange to go through life saying over the top nice things to people and then turning around and treating them horribly, all while thinking that you are not the problem. It must be awfully hard to find your happy place under those circumstances. I’d feel sorry for these people if they weren’t so consciously or unconsciously manipulative.
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