Why It’s Difficult to Be Honest With Ourselves

Have you ever thought about your honesty? Are we really honest with ourselves? Think twice. How about I say that we are not honest with ourselves most of the time. Is it surprising? Probably the question is are we even aware that we don’t want to be honest with ourselves? This is because it’s an awkward question for ourselves. Since we always believe that honesty is a virtue and we are absolutely virtuous at least with ourselves. So, let’s discuss more about this topic in this post and explore why it’s so difficult to even be honest with ourselves.

“Be honest with yourself. The world is not honest with you. The world loves hypocrisy. When you are honest with yourself you find the road to inner peace.” ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

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What Do We Mean by Being Honest With Ourselves

Being honest with ourselves means we can see ourselves with no filters ‌put on. These are the same filters that we used to see the world. These filters are the conditioning of our minds. So, to be honest with ourselves, we need to recondition our minds. For instance, say you want to reduce your anxiety, which causes you stress. Then it is imperative to keep on asking what causes those anxieties. Why are ‌you anxious most of the time? Many times, our desires make us anxious. Because we are constantly expecting an outcome that we want to satisfy one of our selfish desires. It is as if we become slaves to our desires, which causes all these anxieties.

Often these desires are the lower-level desires for money, power, status, fame, and sex. Often more than we really need, that is natural. Anything over our natural needs that Epicurus advocated is because of our greed. Once we taste some of these, we want more. Then more. This is a hedonic treadmill. The more we get, the more we adapt ourselves to the excessiveness. Now the question is, do we really want to be honest with ourselves and ask, do we really want more that we naturally need? Because what we really need is never excess.

Why We Don’t Know We Are Not Honest With Ourselves

Most of the time we don’t really know that we are not honest with ourselves. This is because we don’t want to accept that a lot of our desires are not really natural. By natural, I mean think about the desires of animals. They would consume what they needed naturally to live and survive. However, man’s desires are often unnatural because often we don’t know what is enough. As if it’s a never-ending race for desires which are mostly to satisfy our ego. Whereas we might convince ourselves of the varied reasons, we have these desires often for our family. Although we might reason they are to fulfill our duties, we don’t want to go a level deeper and ask if our families really need the excesses that we convince our families need.

Therefore, it’s very easy to convince ourselves that we really need the unnatural desires that we are striving for to feed our egos. Because it is difficult to live a simple life satisfying only our natural needs. The world conditions us to believe we need all unnatural desires. It wants to condition us, and we are happy to offer ourselves to be conditioned because we are tempted by greed.

Why It’s Difficult to be Honest With Ourselves

It is difficult to be honest with ourselves primarily because we don’t want to be. That is something that we don’t even consciously accept. Only our subconscious knows that we are not honest. That’s the reason our subconscious mind processes these through our dreams. Then we wake up in the morning and shrug off those dreams. Subsequently, our conscious mind puts on filters and justifies our desires. For this reason, we never want to accept that we are not honest with ourselves.

Whereas the question may be why we don’t take off the filters of conditioning from our minds? As a result, we can be honest with ourselves. But the fact is that it’s extremely difficult to uproot our conditioning of our minds. This conditioning has happened since we were children. Done over years through our family, culture, and society. Besides, how can we give up our conditioning since it has become our identity? That is who we have become and who we are now. Therefore, we justify our dishonesty on the pretense of our identity.

What Can Happen if We are Honest With Ourselves

Now, if we can be honest with ourselves, we can probably see through a lot of our own follies. Notably, we don’t really want to face ourselves. That we want to keep on running from ourselves. Meaning we don’t want to listen to our soul. Because often we need the courage to peel through the layers of conditioning that society has built around us. Even if we peel off one layer, the surrounding society will put on another layer. So we stay in the matrix continually. This has so much to do with family, societal, and cultural expectations. When I see the many TV channels in the surrounding gym, I realise how the media conditions us.

If we can truly see through this conditioning, then the conditioning cannot influence us anymore or loses a lot of its power. But this requires us to be aware of our desires and our fears. Because that is what the Matrix uses to condition us. In fact, we give‌ power to the Matrix, and then it just manipulates us. When we can truly realise what nourishes our soul versus what‌ society expects from us, then we can use our time to expand our soul and be at peace with ourselves.

Indeed, most of the time we don’t know what to do with our time. That leads us to let the matrix decide what we should do with our time. Often we get wrapped around the word “should”. But what really matters at the end of our lives is what we really “want” and “why”.

Conclusion on Why It’s Difficult to Be Honest With Ourselves

This brings us to the end of this post. We seem to run from ourselves all the time and don’t really want to face ourselves. Because it is often easy to stay busy without trying to ask and answer the bigger questions in our lives. Often married couples stay busy in their jobs and careers; the intent is to provide a good quality of life for their families. Now, we can define what a good quality of life is‌; it only depends on our perspective. But to achieve this, working spouses sacrifice their family time. The time they spend together as spouses together then parents with kids and their older generations. Finally, in this tradeoff, spouses often become strangers to each other, and kids drift away from parents as they grow up, building their own support systems. Which may or may not be healthy.

Then the question is, everyone is trying to do what they are really for their families, why are the families drifting apart? Is it because everyone is too busy making money to support each other that eventually the money is not of much use to bond the family back together again? So, finally, the question is: are we really doing what we are doing to support our family, or are we doing it for our own egos? Besides, our egos are nothing but a reflection of our conditioning. Moreso it is difficult to be honest with ourselves, to see through the layers of our ego and accept how trapped we are inside these layers of illusions.