These days it’s fine to fake it.
OK, not if you’re an athlete on steroids, an author who fudged facts or a dean at a university who falsified a resume.
But women happily admit to getting their eyes done and wrinkles removed to look younger than their years, something they might have tried to hide just a few years ago.
Conversely, new furniture is beaten with chains and otherwise distressed to create an instant antique look that is as popular as the real thing. No one is shocked to discover that you didn’t find that sideboard in Grandma’s attic.
Technology has made it easier than ever to fake it. With something as basic as call forwarding, you can answer your work phone from a park bench on a lovely spring afternoon. No one will be the wiser.
A new book has taken faking to the next level: “Faking It: How to Seem Like a Better Person Without Actually Improving Yourself,” by Amir Blumenfeld, Neel Shah and Ethan Trex. It’s meant to be funny; but while you’re laughing out loud, you might find it’s uncomfortably close to what people actually do.
“It’s one step over the top,” Trex said. “But the underlying logic is pretty applicable to most people’s lives.”
As the authors point out, it’s not who you are, it’s who other people think you are.
To his surprise, Trex, 24, found out that, “Everyone is very comfortable saying they do these things. It’s more common than people realize. In reality, our parents and friends say they do this stuff too. Especially the older ones in their late 50s.”
Let’s say, for instance, you know nothing about classical music. If someone asks who you think is the greatest composer of all time, the authors advise, answer either Bach or Mozart.
“Either choice is arguable and will hold you in good stead,” according to the book. “You can’t be effectively debated, and if someone tries, simply reply: ‘Mozart! (Or Bach)’. There’s nothing more to say!” (Another tip is “being dismissive to hide your ignorance.”)
How about telling your friends you’re planning to run the New York Marathon? The training happens when your friends are in bed, the runners are chosen by a lottery system, and most don’t get in. Just curse your bad luck when the time rolls around and say you weren’t chosen — but you can bask in the glory for months before then.
Trex doesn’t actually admit to having used any of the techniques himself, except that he has bought expensive brands of liquor and, when they’re empty, refilled them with the cheaper stuff.
“Nobody ever notices,” he said.
Don’t believe him?
Consider an article in The Wall Street Journal about office slackers who can manipulate their computer desktop from a hand-held. They open and close windows on the screen and move things around remotely. The boss passing by and seeing different screens might think they’re in the office but away from their desk.
Many people resort to some form of benign cheating. You probably don’t even think of it as faking it — from touching up your photo on MySpace to making a whole faux existence for yourself through Second Life, the online virtual world built and run by its residents.
How about re-gifting, so common now it even has a trendy name?
Some people consider pretending to agonize over the choice of a birthday present as just a little white lie. But recent research suggests that people are “fundamentally motivated to lie,” said Ty Tashiro, who teaches courses on interpersonal relationships at the University of Maryland, College Park.
“People are pretty effortless liars,” Tashiro said.
What’s different today with the Internet, instant messaging and texting is that we don’t have the pressure of facing other people.
“It’s easier to fake it,” Tashiro said.
For instance, the number of blonds and men with higher-than-average incomes on dating sites just doesn’t correlate with society as a whole, as the book “Freakonomics” points out.
Sometimes being OK with faking it slides over into something a little more disturbing. Take collegehumor.com’s recently released survey on cheating, which polled more than 30,000 students. More than half — 61 percent — admitted to some form of cheating, while only 16.5 percent felt bad about it.
Surprisingly, technology, which has made so much of today’s finest examples of faking it possible, didn’t play a huge part. The most popular form of cheating was looking over someone’s shoulder.
