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Stop me if you’ve heard this before.
You have a new email. It’s from a self proclaimed “Nigerian prince” that wants to send you a million dollars, but he needs your credentials, or he needs you to send him a few bucks beforehand.
Or you see a tweet from a personality you look up to declaring that if you send them $1.000 in bitcoin, they will send $2.000 back.
Or you get a phone call from an unknown number saying that you won a giveaway for a car and you need to send a few hundred bucks to claim your award.
Do you smell it?
Yeah, that’s called BULLSHIT.
What is bullshit?
What is bullshit?
If you look it up in the dictionary, you may see the definition of bullshit refers to “stupid or untrue talk or writing; nonsense”.
In other words, bullshit refers to someone trying to manufacture reality, or attempting to make shit up.
Bullshit may take the form of someone attempting to scam you, or it may be a friend to blurting out untrue facts about what he did on Friday night, a model posting extremely photo shopped photos on social media, or someone making outrageous claims about their sexual history.
Bullshit evolves alongside civilization. It is always maturing in it’s subtleties and can sometimes be extremely hard to discern.
But how do we know when we have encountered bullshit?
How to smell bullshit
How to smell bullshit
Yeah, sure you understand LOGICALLY what bullshit means, but how do you realize something’s bullshit when you’re in the moment?
What are the red flags that should usually make you go “oh, wait, that’s fake as fuck”.
You may have heard before the phrase “If it’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t true.”
Seriously speaking, using basic common sense could be our best ally in not getting bullshited.
Just ask yourself whether that would actually happen in the real world, in usual circumstances.
2. Check for how hard people are pushing for you to spend money
We live in a world of “caveat venditor” (seller beware) — where honesty, fairness, and transparency are often the only viable paths.
In the 21st century, selling of any kinds occurs at the will of the buyer, not of the seller.
For anyone trying to get cash from you as soon as possible you know you have to circumvent them.
3. Press on with questions
Before proceeding any further (giving away credentials or money), just start asking questions and see if their logic cracks.
Follow the answers given, assess the logic and check if what they are saying makes actual sense.
How to call out bullshit?
How to call out bullshit?
You were able to identify bullshit.
You were able to acknowledge that something’s fake, or made up.
Now what?
There’s lots of different actions and reactions depending on the situation.
I’ll try to give a few examples:
Your friend has made outrageous claims
No need to go apeshit if that person is an actual friend, if their claims were not in any way directly affecting you or your family.
Most likely sitting that person down and explaining to them the consequences of their actions would hopefully lead to them not bullshiting any more.
Chronical lying can stem from a lack of feeling worthy, it may be a sign or loneliness, of needing attention. You don’t need to solve all of your friend’s problems, but you need to be their friend and help wherever requested.
2. You get an “email from a Nigerian prince”
That’s usually called SPAM.
No need to spend more of your time or energy dealing with it, but one way you may have quite a lot of fun would be to start replying by talking like a child, asking the stupidest of questions and making sure you’re ruining the scammer’s day.
If they were trying to scam you, you could use the time to waste their time.
3. You observe bullshit online content
Most likely, that particular content creator has designed his content in order to be controversial, in order to have as many questions marks, in order to have as many people calling it bullshit and thus talking about it.
The $750 Apple wheels are a great example of the fact that there’s no bad marketing and asking bullshit prices and be beneficial for the company.
4. Your car seller is starting to bullshit you
If that’s the problem, just start pressing on, testing their claims, or asking questions. At some point, their made up logic will crack and you will know when the time has come.
But most importantly, remember not to turn into a complete skeptic. Sure there’s a lot of bullshit out there, sure we can’t care about everything especially when it sound a little bit too good to be true, but there is still good in the world, there’s still a lot of good people, reliable sources and actual things that seem bullshit, but are pure awesomeness.
Finding the line between bullshit and reality is a journey of a lifetime, but you can start here:
Photo credits:
Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash
Photo by Obi Onyeador on Unsplash
Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash
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