The Foundation of Polite Fiction

There is a profound frustration in knowing exactly when someone is being insincere. People think they want a human lie detector in their lives, but they don’t. They really don’t. If you knew how many times your friends said ‘we should grab coffee’ while their internal frequency shifted into the 83-hertz range of ‘I hope I never see you again,’ you would never leave your house. Society is built on a foundation of 43 tiny lies per hour. We need them. We need the polite fiction that everything is fine, that the 73-degree office is comfortable, and that we actually care about the weekend plans of the person in the elevator. When you strip that away, you aren’t left with ‘honesty’; you’re left with a raw, bleeding mess of human insecurity that no one is equipped to handle. My job is to find the breaking point where a lie becomes a crime, but lately, I find myself more interested in the lies we tell to keep ourselves sane.

Take this warehouse claim. It’s worth $933,000. Henderson isn’t a bad man; he’s just a man whose business failed in 3 different ways at once, and he saw a way out through the smoke. I can hear the desperation in the way he breathes between sentences. It’s a shallow, 3-count inhale. It’s the sound of a man who is drowning in 13 inches of water and is convinced that if he just tells the right story, the water will turn into dry land. I should feel bad for him, but all I can think about is the notification on her phone right now. Does she see it? Is she laughing? Or worse, is she feeling that heavy, 23-pound weight of pity that I used to feel when she would lie about where she’d been? She used to tell me she was at her mother’s house, and her voice would always drop into a low, 103-hertz register. I never called her out on it. I just sat there and let the frequency wash over me, a silent witness to the slow erosion of our ‘us.’

I often think that the contrarian view of deception is that we don’t lie enough. Or rather, we aren’t skilled enough at it to make it a kindness. A good lie is an act of mercy. A bad lie, like Henderson’s warehouse fire or my ‘accidental’ like, is just a failure of imagination. If I were a better liar, I would have unliked the photo in 3 seconds and pretended it never happened. Instead, I stared at it for 23 minutes, paralyzed by the digital footprint I’d just left. We are all trying to adjust our own narratives, trying to claim damages for things that were already broken long before the fire started. When a building burns, you see the physical loss, but the internal loss-the structural integrity of a person’s character-is much harder to quantify. You need experts to navigate that kind of wreckage. If you’ve ever had to handle a real crisis, like a home being leveled or a business going under, you know that the paperwork is a language of its own. It’s why people turn to National Public Adjusting when the reality of the damage exceeds their ability to describe it. They need someone who can translate the silence into a settlement, someone who understands that the fine print is where the truth actually hides.

Henderson continues his story. He mentions a faulty wire. The software on my screen turns bright red. The stress levels in his voice just hit a peak of 123. That’s the ‘gotcha’ moment. That’s where the insurance company saves their $933,000 and Henderson loses everything. I should feel a sense of professional accomplishment, but I just feel tired. The room feels small, maybe 13 square feet of sterile walls and expensive microphones. I am a voice stress analyst who can’t even analyze the stress in my own heart. I am looking at a 153-Hertz spike on a monitor while my own pulse is likely thumping at a steady 93 beats per minute in my throat. We are all claimants in the court of life, filing for losses we can’t prove and hoping the adjuster doesn’t look too closely at the timeline.

I remember one time, 3 years ago, we were sitting on that very beach from the photo. The sun was setting at 7:03 PM. She told me she was happy. I didn’t have my equipment with me, but I didn’t need it. I could hear the 63 percent stress in the word ‘happy.’ It sounded like a floorboard about to snap. I didn’t say anything. I just watched the waves, counting the 13 seconds between each crash. I let her lie because the truth would have ended the vacation early, and I wasn’t ready to go home yet. That’s the secret of my profession: most people hear the lie and they choose to believe it because the alternative is a 43-day argument that ends in a 3-bedroom house becoming a 1-bedroom apartment. We are all public adjusters of our own reality, shifting the numbers until the loss feels manageable.

The Agony of Recent Action

There is a specific kind of agony in the ‘recent action’ of my life. Liked their ex’s photo from three years ago. It sounds like a headline in the local paper of my personal failures. I ponder if there is a software for this, a way to scrub the digital micro-tremors of a broken heart. Probably not. Technology can find the lie in a warehouse fire, but it can’t find the logic in a late-night social media relapse. I look back at Henderson’s file. I have to write the report. I have to state, with 93 percent certainty, that he is attempting to defraud the company. It will take me 3 hours to write. It will cost him his future. And yet, the injustice of it doesn’t bother me as much as it should. What bothers me is that I can’t explain to him that I understand. I want to tell him that we all try to burn down the things that are already dead. We just don’t all use gasoline.

[The most dangerous lies are the ones that rhyme with the truth.]

I shut down the V-3 analyzer. The screen goes black, reflecting my own face in the 13-inch glow of the remaining LED power light. I look older than I did 3 years ago. There are 3 new lines around my eyes that weren’t there when that beach photo was taken. I think about the warehouse again. Why that warehouse? It was a storage facility for antique furniture. 103 pieces of history, all turned to ash. Maybe he just wanted to be free of the weight of it. Maybe the storage fees were $433 a month and he just couldn’t justify the cost of holding onto things that no longer had a home. That’s a frequency I can understand. The cost of holding on is always higher than the cost of letting go, but the insurance only pays out for the fire, not the slow rot of obsolescence.

My phone pings. A notification. My heart does a 23-hertz leap. Is it her? Did she comment? Did she send a 3-word message like ‘Why the like?’ or ‘Are you okay?’ I reach for the device, my fingers trembling slightly. It’s a 103-degree fever of anticipation. I tap the screen. It’s a notification for a 23% discount on pizza. The universe has a cruel sense of humor, and its timing is always perfectly calibrated to maximize human disappointment. I put the phone face down on the desk. I will not look at it again for at least 13 minutes. That is the rule I am making for myself, a small boundary in a world that has become far too porous.

Drowning in Data, Starving for Truth

We live in an age of total transparency that is actually a hall of mirrors. We have 103 ways to track each other, 23 ways to analyze a voice, and 3 different satellites that can see the heat signature of a warehouse fire from space. And yet, we are more lost than ever. We are drowning in data but starving for a single 3-syllable word that is actually true. I’ll write the report on Henderson. I’ll tell the truth about his lie. And then I’ll go home to my 1-bedroom apartment, and I’ll probably look at that photo one more time, just to see if the sunset in 2021 was really as orange as I remember, or if I’m just miscalculating the frequency of my own nostalgia. In the end, we are all just trying to adjust the claim on our own lives, hoping someone, somewhere, accepts the evidence of our existence as valid.