#1 ·
I’ve been spiraling down a rabbit hole lately, watching a lot of those "unbelievable" true crime docs that pop up on the streaming services. You know the ones—the kind where you spend the first half of the film thinking the writers are just being incredibly lazy with the script, only to realize halfway through that the reality is actually much weirder and more unsettling than anything a screenwriter could concoct.
But it’s not even the "crime" part that’s been sticking in my craw this week. It’s the psychological driver behind it. I find myself thinking about that specific, desperate human impulse to fill a void, even if it means constructing an entire alternate reality to do it. We all have things we want—some want money, some want fame, some want love—but there’s a very specific, very dark subset of people who don't just want these things; they feel they *must* possess them to exist. They don't just want to experience a certain life; they want to inhabit a lie so completely that the lie becomes their truth.
It makes me wonder about the mechanics of the human mind. At what point does a person’s desire cross the threshold from "passionate" to "pathological"? We tend to look at these extreme cases as outliers, as these monsters or "broken" individuals that exist outside the norm. But if you peel back the layers, isn't the capacity for self-deception present in almost all of us? We lie to ourselves about our habits, our relationships, and our potential every single day. We build these little mental scaffolds to protect our egos.
What happens when those scaffolds become a fortress? I was reading a study recently about how the brain handles cognitive dissonance, and it’s fascinating how we can hold two completely contradictory ideas in our heads simultaneously without losing our minds. For some people, that ability to bridge the gap between "what is" and "what they desperately need to be" seems to be dialed up to an eleven. It's almost as if the brain decides that the truth is too painful to bear, so it just... rewrites the software. It’s not just a lie told to others; it’s a profound, structural lie told to the self.
I can't help but think about the people who get caught in the wake of these delusions. It’s easy to judge the person at the center of the storm from the safety of your couch, but the collateral damage is where the real tragedy lies. There are families, institutions, and innocent bystanders who end up living in the wreckage of someone else's manufactured reality. It’s a special kind of cruelty because the perpetrator often genuinely believes they are acting out of love or necessity, which makes them even harder to reason with.
I also find myself questioning our modern obsession with "living your truth." We use that phrase so much now—it's almost a mantra. We encourage people to be authentic, to find their purpose, to chase their dreams. But there’s a dark side to that rhetoric if taken to a pathological extreme. What happens when someone’s "truth" is something that is fundamentally impossible or harmful? Where do we draw the line between "finding yourself" and "losing your grip on reality"?
It's a heavy topic, I know. I've just been sitting here thinking about how fragile the consensus of reality actually is. We all agree that the sky is blue and that we are who we say we are, but that agreement is a thin veneer. Beneath it, there's a massive, swirling ocean of individual perceptions, biases, and—in extreme cases—total fabrications.
Do you think people who commit these kinds of "identity" crimes are actually capable of recognizing the truth once they are caught, or is the delusion so deep that even a prison cell or a courtroom can't break it?
But it’s not even the "crime" part that’s been sticking in my craw this week. It’s the psychological driver behind it. I find myself thinking about that specific, desperate human impulse to fill a void, even if it means constructing an entire alternate reality to do it. We all have things we want—some want money, some want fame, some want love—but there’s a very specific, very dark subset of people who don't just want these things; they feel they *must* possess them to exist. They don't just want to experience a certain life; they want to inhabit a lie so completely that the lie becomes their truth.
It makes me wonder about the mechanics of the human mind. At what point does a person’s desire cross the threshold from "passionate" to "pathological"? We tend to look at these extreme cases as outliers, as these monsters or "broken" individuals that exist outside the norm. But if you peel back the layers, isn't the capacity for self-deception present in almost all of us? We lie to ourselves about our habits, our relationships, and our potential every single day. We build these little mental scaffolds to protect our egos.
What happens when those scaffolds become a fortress? I was reading a study recently about how the brain handles cognitive dissonance, and it’s fascinating how we can hold two completely contradictory ideas in our heads simultaneously without losing our minds. For some people, that ability to bridge the gap between "what is" and "what they desperately need to be" seems to be dialed up to an eleven. It's almost as if the brain decides that the truth is too painful to bear, so it just... rewrites the software. It’s not just a lie told to others; it’s a profound, structural lie told to the self.
I can't help but think about the people who get caught in the wake of these delusions. It’s easy to judge the person at the center of the storm from the safety of your couch, but the collateral damage is where the real tragedy lies. There are families, institutions, and innocent bystanders who end up living in the wreckage of someone else's manufactured reality. It’s a special kind of cruelty because the perpetrator often genuinely believes they are acting out of love or necessity, which makes them even harder to reason with.
I also find myself questioning our modern obsession with "living your truth." We use that phrase so much now—it's almost a mantra. We encourage people to be authentic, to find their purpose, to chase their dreams. But there’s a dark side to that rhetoric if taken to a pathological extreme. What happens when someone’s "truth" is something that is fundamentally impossible or harmful? Where do we draw the line between "finding yourself" and "losing your grip on reality"?
It's a heavy topic, I know. I've just been sitting here thinking about how fragile the consensus of reality actually is. We all agree that the sky is blue and that we are who we say we are, but that agreement is a thin veneer. Beneath it, there's a massive, swirling ocean of individual perceptions, biases, and—in extreme cases—total fabrications.
Do you think people who commit these kinds of "identity" crimes are actually capable of recognizing the truth once they are caught, or is the delusion so deep that even a prison cell or a courtroom can't break it?