One thing which is serving me every day in my life is my internal “bullshit-detector”. It’s a fifth sense with which I immediately sense whether a person is full of shit or whether a person is authentic and honorable.
I can detect bullshit from a wide distance: By the way a person dresses, by the way a person is moving through the room. Before a person is close enough to talk to me, I have already evaluated his level of bullshit.
When they are close enough, their smell, the way they shake hands, how they introduce themselves, their tone of voice, and the way they speak and what they say give me the last hint I need to assess whether this person is full of shit or not.
It has served me well in the past. It protected me from people with ill intentions, from crypto scammers, from vaccinations with unknown side effects, toxic relationships, bad restaurants, soul-less jobs, bad investments, from narcissists, and bad sex.
My bullshit detector is detecting the energy a person is radiating. It is impossible for me to decipher how it works exactly – I just learned to trust it.
However, one prominent factor of my bullshit detector is authenticity. Most people can detect whether a person is authentic or not. When you sense that a person is not authentic, you have to be careful and pay attention. Inauthenticity always means that a person is faking something. An inauthentic person is an actor. For example, a introverted person acting extroverted. A poor person driving an expensive car. Billionaires in private jets fighting climate change. Per exemple.
One big factor within authenticity is self-confidence. There are people with high self-confidence, low self-confidence, and even people without any self-confidence. There are people without self-confidence who are absolutely great and wholeheartedly person. Just as there are high self-confidence people who are genuinely good individuals. But as soon there is a mismatch, there’s a red flag. For example, a person can act confident, but deep inside they are unconfident. I can sense it in the way they talk, move, smell, smile.
Another obvious factor within my bullshit score is their level of virtue signaling. You can detect virtue signaling quite easily. Virtue signaling means someone is supporting a cause not because of the cause of it but solely to be perceived by other people in a certain way. These are the people who use syringes and Ukraine flags in their social media accounts. Virtue signalers talk publicly and prominently about their cause. People who do real good, rarely talk about it. Virtue signalers are the opposite, they always talk about it, but they rarely do any good. A general rule of thumb: the more a person talks publicly about the good things he is doing, the more full of shit he is.
Correctly assessing authenticity is the key for detecting actors, fakers, deceivers, and liars. Honesty can help you when assessing authenticity. Individuals who are brutally honest – with themselves and others – are always authentic. If a person is brutally honest about what he believes to be the truth, then he is authentic. On a bullshit scale from 0 to 10 (with 0 = no bullshit and 10 = full of shit), a brutally honest person is always very close to 0.
If you are not sure, whether a person is full of shit, you ask him challenging and uncomfortable questions and assess whether he is brutally honest in his answer. Developing an internal detector for authenticity and bullshit is the ultimate way to live a good life.
