Hello and welcome to What is a Good Life? A project exploring big questions around what really matters to people. Over the last 5 years, I have interviewed over 300 people around this question.
This week, I am reflecting on my conversation with Kat Miles. I read a post on LinkedIn one particularly gloomy news day that really lifted my spirits. It was about a movement by the Brixton Traders & Community Association, led by Kat Miles, and how she and her fellow traders are working to bring Brixton Village and Market Row into community ownership. Our whole conversation is filled with inspiration around doing what you think needs to be done, standing up for what you believe in, and the cultural value of community.
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Take care, Mark
1. My Weekly Reflection
“The lack of what I would like to call baseline truth within politics and in our society is really shocking.”
In response to my weekly opening question of “is there a question you are exploring as you move through life?”, Kat responded with a wondering around what level of honesty the wider world will accept, how that differs from what she will accept in herself, and how to navigate that.
As a child she was asked about a family situation where she had simply told the truth. It was shocking to her that it caused so much trouble for her and that she was punished for simply saying it as it was.
There is a poignant image she shared of herself as a child, sitting in the wide windowsill of her bedroom, staying up after bedtime, looking up at the night sky and contemplating the nuance of honesty. We assume this level of evolution with our honesty, adults teach children about it, although I don’t see that holding up.
We load honesty with so much morality that it’s hard to examine it with curiosity. But there is considerable value in asking what is my relationship with honesty – am I even honest with myself?
In my life, I was granted a reprieve from this resistance to examining it when a whopper of a self-deception fell apart. I created a narrative around how my father leaving the family home when I was a toddler would never affect me.
When the obviousness of that fallacy became clear to me on the other side of it, I became obsessed with honesty for a time. One experiment I ran was carrying a notebook around with me for a couple of weeks and I took note of any lies that I told: anything from an embellishment, an excuse for being late, dishonesty around intentions, and more.
I’d mark down a tally mark every time I did it. I was pretty amazed by how frequently the marks would appear even with my own awareness that the experiment was underway. It was usually for the sake of ease or protecting a vulnerability rather than anything sinister, which I think is true for most people.
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When I finished the experiment, I did the typical thing of making a rigid value of honesty and went through a phase of attempting to protect that over anything. Even the humanity I’d show others, all in the name of honesty.
But when I chilled out I noticed something much more interesting.
Honesty for me has little to do with morality and far more to do with the comfort I felt in my own skin – and the absence of discomfort.
I think the lack of baseline truth that Kat alludes to creates so much dis-ease in our lives. When there is enough space in my life to notice, I feel the tension in my own body if I have been dishonest and I am suggesting otherwise. It eats away at me. Acknowledging the dishonesty is almost more self-preservation than morality. The justification of widely held standards or deceptions does little to soothe it.
As Kat points to in the interview:
“Dishonesty, this is for me, is a massive thing that makes me very unhappy. And I think in the world it makes most people unhappy. It’s the cause of a lot of unhappiness.”
I remember speaking with a psychologist one day who told me how he got out of a conference the following day by saying he was unwell. I just said, “Ah so you lied.” He suggested, “Well if I am sick tomorrow, then it wouldn’t be a lie.”
I was briefly taken aback by this, but then I recalled all the messaging adults give kids about goodness and honesty. The word lie or liar carries so much weight.
I don’t think the biggest problem is whether we occasionally lie or not, it is when we lose the capacity to realise we have done so.
Lately I have been playing with an idea I have around the “second reaction.” It is not focussed on fixing or overcoming our immediate reaction but our response to something that is habituated.
If I lose my cool, instead of defending it, or demonising myself, I am more interested in how quickly can I acknowledge to someone that yes, I have lost my cool. Even mid-flow in the act of losing my cool. I’ve told my wife I love her mid-argument, and apologised while it was still going on. It totally changes the vulnerability we are willing to share or the accountability we take in the immediate aftermath.
I’m interested in not hanging all the importance of an event or experience based on our initial response, but how we respond to that initial response. The psychologist’s “If I am sick tomorrow…” is the second reaction. That is where he could have said, “Yeah, I lied.”
With dishonesty, I don’t find the interesting part to be if a human ever lies or not. But our response to it.
From the hundreds of interviews I have conducted around this question, exploring our relationship with honesty has profound effects on how comfortable we feel in our own skin. It is not by some deluded sense of perfecting ourselves that the interesting changes occur, but in initially meeting ourselves where we are.
2. This Week’s Questions
How would you describe your relationship with honesty?
What does it feel like in your body when you’re being dishonest?
3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast
4. Full Episode - The Truth Will Set You Free with Kat Miles - What is a Good Life? #192
Listen to or watch the full conversation with Kat Miles below.
For Apple podcast click here.
About Me
I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.