The Debts We Pay
There is no free lunch.
I recently finished watching HBO’s Chernobyl and if it was intended to rile an emotion of disgust towards having shitty (yes this is the technical term) people in positions of power, then it succeeded. But after ~7 hours, the line that stuck with me is:
"Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.”
It’s what Valery Legasov, the professor who helped clean up the Chernobyl crisis and later committed suicide after recording audio tapes to tell the world about the Soviet cover-up, said in response to the chain of lies that led to the explosion at Chernobyl.
I don’t know if he actually said this in real life but it got me thinking more about debt. Before I go on, I should say the Chernobyl series was excellent.
Long time readers will know that I’m a fan of Taleb and I’ve frequently referred to his disdain on leverage and how it introduces fragility to any condition. Debt is that thing that supercharges everything in the short term but can come to bite you in the behind later.
It could be a free meal, it could be a lie to get someone off your back, it could be money from a bank or hiring people quickly to fuel growth. It lets you quickly get on with life. Discounting the need to pay the costs down the line.
The concept of debt is old. Very old. David Graebar, an anthropologist, gives quite a thoughtful overview in his talk at Google. His book is on my reading list but the talk was enough to get one thinking about how the idea of owing someone something and needing to pay it back being one of the fixtures of humanity. I also bring it up because not long after I watched his talk I found out he passed away a month ago (September, 2020).
We all know that one needs to pay back on their loans. Even if a government runs a bailout, the debt is being paid by someone. Folks pay their mortgages, you Venmo your friends for last night’s bill…even as simple as “I scratch your back so you can scratch mine.”
I don’t think I need to beat the proverbial dead horse any further.
Lies are costly. Thinking short-term and taking short cuts at the expense of facing the truth is costly. Someone will have to pay for it. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be fair either. Most of the time….as it gets larger in scale, it’s not the perpetrators that will be the one paying back the debt.
This means one of the hardest things to do is to not take such shortcuts. To not incur needless debts. To be aware that one is incurring a debt by making tradeoffs for a ‘quick win’. To be aware that debts can compound.
This is what happens to companies that scale too quickly. They hire too fast and the need to hire fast to grow fast loosens standards to build any kind of foundation. It then leads to the meltdown of companies like a house of cards with no foundation.
Such is the case for a person’s character which tries to succeed by owing favours and favours on end and covering up mistakes. Eventually, all debts will need to be paid.
That makes telling the truth the harder thing to do. The path devoid of taking on debt isn’t for the faint of heart. To withstand any short term embarrassment or humiliation if need be. To forestall rapid growth. To wait on the achievement of fantasies and dreams until it is earned honestly.
Honesty is hard. For some, it’s hard to say the truth. For some, it’s hard to stomach the reaction after the truth. For some, it’s both. Succumbing to fear is easy. That’s why many do it.
That’s why I did so much when I was young. But turns out I have a poor poker face so I always got caught lying. So now I default to being honest because I feel sick when I don’t. But turns out I’m not so good at handling the displeasure that comes from such honesty. But that’s the tradeoff I make.
The tradeoff we all will need to make.