The Lies We Choose

Why Most People Take the Blue Pill—and Call It Love

Fantasy is easier. But the cost is your life.

We say we want the truth.

But most people don’t.

When offered the choice—the blue pill or the red—most will reach, quietly and without hesitation, for the blue. Not because they’re foolish. But because they’re afraid. Afraid that the truth might dismantle the fragile scaffolding of the life they’ve built.

Science backs this up. A 2018 study from the University of Oslo coined the term “reality avoidance bias”: our cognitive tendency to reject information that disrupts our internal sense of identity or safety.

In other words: we’d rather be wrong than destabilized.

So we construct fantasies.

Stories that soothe us, that explain away neglect, distance, or mediocrity. Stories where the person who keeps hurting us really means well. Where our partner is just “busy,” not disengaged. Where the opportunity we never pursued was “never right,” not the product of fear.

I saw this play out clearly with my father.

We were speaking about something simple, but beneath it lay a truth he couldn’t face: that he had not been chosen in the way he believed. I laid out the facts gently. I gave him every chance to meet reality. But instead, he rewrote it. Because the fantasy preserved something vital: his sense of worth.

I didn’t correct him. I didn’t push because I understood. When the truth threatens the foundation of your identity, denial becomes its own kind of mercy.

The blue pill is believing the best in others long after they’ve shown you who they are—bending facts into hope. Telling ourselves we’re being “compassionate,” when really, we are just afraid to be alone with the truth.

But after I came close to death—see: After Almost Dying—that capacity disappeared. 

Mortality stripped away the cushion of illusion. It showed me how abruptly life ends, how unresolved it remains. There is no finale, no perfectly timed goodbye, no ceremonial closure.

You don’t finally check off your to-do list.

You don’t return the call.

You don’t get the expensive meal you promised yourself when things “settled down.”

You just… leave. Mid-sentence. Laundry unfinished. And everything you avoided seeing stands waiting in the room, untouched.

After that, I could no longer pretend. I started choosing truth, even when it was brutal. Especially then. Because somewhere in that cold clarity, I found something sacred: dignity.

And unlike fantasy, it holds.

No, I wouldn’t go back. Not to the warmth of denial. Not to those sweet, anesthetized narratives we call love, or loyalty, or hope. Because the truth, while not always gentle, is real. And only the real has the power to liberate.

We all live inside stories. But not all stories are worthy of us.

So the question becomes:

What lie are you still living in? And if offered the truth—unfiltered, irreversible—

Would you dare to take it?