10 Things Millennials Are Incredibly Good at Lying About

1. How Much Alcohol They Consumed The Night Before

A tale as old as time. If you’re looking to assess actual accuracy, a good rule of thumb is to apply the 5:1 ratio. Meaning, for every five drinks consumed, subtract one drink from that person’s total. When the DE (drink exaggerator) hits certain milestones (i.e., 10, 20), subtract an additional drink.

Each time the hungover victim recaps what he or she did the night before, make sure to mimic their tone of voice. This is great fun. 


2. Their Own Social Media Activity

“Oh yea, I think I saw you post that on Facebook.” Hah. You totally fucking saw it and then debated for five minutes about whether or not to comment. You fool, you. 


3. Accurately Assessing How Much Sleep They Got Last Night

People hate giving their REM cycles credit. Which is sort of weird, because pulling an all-nighter is really just a euphemism for watching George Carlin videos, suddenly having huge ideas, and ultimately never following through on them. 

Yet, our FOMO culture mandates that not sleeping = having cool and important stuff to do, so make sure you’re telling people you’re getting as little sleep as possible. Having an “addiction” to coffee is also a good call, because it insinuates that while you’re totally a mess and completely falling apart, you are also not at all.  

 

4. Having Seen “Back to the Future” 

*Before you rally your angry witch hunt mob, take note that I’m using Back to the Future as a reference point

Given that movies are old and we aren’t, it’s guaranteed that anyone under age 25 hasn’t seen at least 50% of the movies referenced on their “100 Famous Movie Quotes” poster from Freshman year–a move that attempted to display a proud interest in movies and culture and being interesting, but ultimately displayed an affinity for playing the harmonica, having curly hair, and being too terrified to talk to girls.  

We don’t need to discuss the various strains of “How have you not seen that?” or “whoever hasn’t seen that movie is an extremely shitty person for having a slightly different existence than me,” but everyone has one. Mine is Back to the Future. Except that nobody knows this, because I’ve made it a point to insert random Marty McFly and DeLorean references into general conversation. As I don’t have a savings account, this is what I do to invest. And it’s paying off wonderfully.

(If you’re doubting me, just google Jurassic Park and make Jeff Goldblum references galore. This shit will change your life.) 


5. Listening to Entire Albums

The only reason anybody nowadays would listen to a whole album is so they can tell internet strangers about it via reviewing it on Pitchfork, Spin, or soundandfury.wordpress.com. And in every single one of these circumstances, it’s really just a dude with slightly unkempt scruff being obsessed with the fact that he’s got the fortitude to listen to an entire album. Which really means he’s just listening to himself and thinking about how to tweet about it.

Also of note: if a person listens to a full album, the time commitment/cultural taste ratio deems it mandatory for that person to call that album “the album of the year.”

6. …And “Knowing” Bands

 

7. Acting Like The Dating Game Is ‘Hopeless’

Remember when you applied to college, and decided that you’d just assume you wouldn’t get in anywhere, so that if you did you’d be pleasantly surprised? Perhaps this is the long-term effect of studying hours and hours to get decent grades only to get rejected from your dream college, but this is the same way many millennials are approaching dating. Problem is, college is aggressive in the sense that it uses a bunch of Malcolm Gladwell theories to decide if you’re “great” or not in under five seconds. People are not. 

Courtship protocols aside, if both sexes take the “lower your expectations route,” you’re naturally gonna move away instead of toward. Guys have no incentive to court girls, and girls have no incentive to attempt to move closer to guys. Everyone turns into  LIT in 1999.

8. How “Swamped” They Are at Work or School

For some mystifying reason, most people tend to forget that 10-70% of doing anything is sitting on gchat making it look like you are doing something. This isn’t any sort of big, taboo secret either. Your “busy” status isn’t fooling anyone. 

9. Their Knowledge of the Great Gatsby

In terms of having read the actual pages from the actual book. Also: The Sun Also Rises, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Great Expectations, The Grapes of Wrath, and basically every other book that isn’t The Catcher in the Rye.

10. Sporting Knowledge

When you get to be around 17 years of age, one of two things happen–you either a.) try to do stuff with your life, and have interests, or b.) resolve to be a townie, and aspire to have an outlook on life similar to that of your local tattoo parlor owner.  

I am NOT saying either one is better than the other. (In fact, the fact that there’s an insinuation here just goes to show you that people who think being successful is really important are most oftentimes miserable.)  But what I AM saying, is that while one of the two knows every transaction and lowly bench player on the Boston Bruins or New York Mets, the other is too busy acting all important to care, and still thinks that the only NBA player with more potential than Yao Ming is Sebastian Telfair.

These are generally the same people that couldn’t name more than 4 players on their favorite team, only to pretend like their huge diehard fans come playoff time.

Go Isles.

 

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