V: self-doubt is too difficult to actually communicate.
Like... If you express a rational self-doubt, you will just come across as a loser. Even if you are capable and effective and elite.
me: Self-doubt has no merits to a girl
V: Precisley. It's really hard to convey a multi-dimensional personality. That is, if you have self-doubt, you'll come across as a loser. If you are capable and effective, you will come across as a winner. But you cannot communicate a personality that has both without necessarily being either of the two predicates.
Like, you know me well enough to know that I am somewhat cynical and pessimistic. At work, I frequently directly tell people that I am just a huge optimist. But what this conveys is much closer to what I want to communicate than if I were to say I'm a pessimist.
What I want to communicate is multi-dimensional and complex: I am very cautious and deliberate—I have an engineering outlook, so I think about failure and recovery modes. But this is impossible to communicate.
So my choices are:
I'm an optimist, so I try to get things done.
I am a pessimist, so I cannot get things done.
The former isn't strictly true, but it's a lot cloesr to the truth than the latter. So I just make it easier for everyone and construct this understandable reality.
I guess that's how you can tell yourself it is okay to be dishonest and manipulative.
me: It's terrible if you have to live that way with the person you like, just because she is anchored to that constructed reality
V: But that's the case with everyone? Not just perosnal relationships. Business relationships.
But it's not that bad
