I’ve developed a quiet dread of three of the most harmless words in the language. “How are you.” Someone lobs it at me across a counter or a doorway, and a small internal panic goes off, because I know I’m about to lie, and I know they want me to.
It’s not that I’m doing badly. That would almost be simpler. It’s that the true answer to “how are you” has become genuinely complicated, layered, contradictory, the sort of thing that would take twenty minutes and a sit-down to render honestly, and absolutely nobody asking has twenty minutes. So I say “good, you?” and we both move on, and I add another small lie to the running daily total.
The question that was never really a question
Something worth understanding about “how are you” is that it stopped being a question a very long time ago. It’s a greeting wearing the costume of a question. A verbal handshake. The expected reply isn’t information, it’s reassurance, a quick “fine, you?” that lets both people confirm the social machinery is working and carry on with their day.
For most of my life this suited me perfectly. The ritual is efficient and kind, in its way. You don’t actually want the cashier’s real medical history, and the cashier doesn’t want yours. The lie is mutual, agreed, and frictionless, and for decades I performed it without a flicker of conscience.
What changed isn’t the ritual. It’s me. Somewhere in the last few years my honest internal answer got too big to fit through the little hatch the question provides, and now every time I post the cheerful single-syllable version through that hatch, I’m aware of everything I’m leaving on my side of the wall.
Why the true answer got so long
I think this happens to a lot of people somewhere in their late thirties, and it tends to arrive without any warning at all.
When you’re young, “how are you” has a short answer because your life has a short answer. Things are mostly one thing at a time. You’re happy or you’re miserable, in love or heartbroken, up or down. But get a couple of decades in and your life stops being one thing. It becomes a dozen things at once, all true simultaneously, none of them cancelling the others out.
On any given Tuesday I might be doing well at work and privately worried about my parents getting older, content in my own skin and aware of friendships I’ve let go thin, grateful for my life and conscious of doors that have started to close, genuinely happy and carrying a low background hum of something I don’t have a name for. That’s the real answer to “how are you.” All of it, at once. There is no honest one-word version of that, because the truth isn’t one word. It’s a weather system.
The lie that started to chafe
For a while I didn’t mind compressing all of that into “good, thanks.” But lately it’s begun to feel like a small betrayal, repeated several times a day, and the discomfort has been building.
Part of it is the sheer volume. Some days I’ll tell six or seven people I’m fine, and by the end of it I feel oddly hollowed out, like a man who’s spent the day reciting lines from a play about a more straightforward person than himself. Each lie is tiny and harmless. But tell enough tiny lies about your own inner state and you start to feel slightly unreal, as though the version of you that walks around saying “good, you?” has detached from the one actually living the complicated life underneath.
And there’s a loneliness in it that surprised me. Saying “fine” forty times a week to people who’d genuinely be alarmed by the truth means moving through your days perpetually slightly unseen, by your own choice, for everyone’s convenience. You can be surrounded by warmth and good will and still feel that nobody quite knows what it’s actually like to be you right now, because the format never allows you to say.
Why I keep lying anyway
An obvious reply to all this is, well, tell the truth then. Answer honestly. And occasionally, with the right person at the right moment, I do. But most of the time I don’t, and not purely out of cowardice.
Mostly, though, the honest version is genuinely too much for the setting. The man scanning my shopping does not have the bandwidth for my mid-life weather report, and it would be a strange imposition to hand it to him. Most “how are yous” arrive in passing, in doorways, between other tasks, and the honest answer would derail the entire exchange and probably alarm the asker, who was performing a greeting, not opening a confessional. The lie isn’t only self-protection. It’s a small courtesy I extend to people who didn’t sign up to hold the real thing.
So I’m stuck in a slightly absurd position. The honest answer is too long for almost everyone, the dishonest one is starting to corrode something, and the question keeps coming, a dozen times a day, cheerfully, relentlessly, from people who mean nothing but well.
What I’ve started doing instead
I haven’t solved it, but I’ve found a couple of small adjustments that take the edge off.
The first is to stop treating the ritual answer as a lie at all. When the cashier asks, “good, you?” isn’t dishonesty, it’s just the correct response in a language whose actual meaning is “I see you, we’re fine here, carry on.” Read that way, it stopped bothering me. You’re not lying to the cashier. You’re both speaking a code you both understand, and there’s no deceit in a code.
The second matters more. I’ve started making sure there are a small number of people in my life who get the real answer, the long one, the weather system, on purpose and at length. Not everyone. Not the man with my shopping. But two or three people with whom I’ve deliberately built the kind of relationship where “how are you” is a real question with real time behind it. Because the dread, I’ve realised, was never about the cashiers. It was the fear that the long answer had nowhere to go at all. That every version of the question, everywhere, got the one-word lie, and the true thing just accumulated, unsaid, with no exit.
It turns out you don’t need everyone to have time for the honest answer. You need a few people to have it, reliably, and then you can hand the rest of the world its cheerful little code word without it costing you anything. The lie only chafes when it’s the only thing you ever get to say.
