15 Cliches That Are Horribly Wrong and May Destroy Your Life

⛔1. Fake it till you make it

a. Faking means creating a parallel reality(a fantasy that appears real). Example: Startup valuation
b. A psychotic disorder is defined as a persistent mental state that is disconnected and devoid of reality.
c. Faking creates psychosis, and psychotic disorder destroys health, and the brain. So even if you make it, you will lose it all.

Evidence:

Ponzi convinced the world of his financial genius, but ended up being recognized for Ponzi’s scheme, and died in jail.

⛔2. Everything is fair in love and war.

a) Love means a feeling of death, followed by relief to connect to life. Ex: mother’s love for a newborn.
b) Fairness means something without a moral flaw. The first law of morality is that every living being(and humans) has the right to live their full potential life.
c) War is a tool for overpowering an entity to get the resources that they have.
d) So an immoral act(one that can kill someone) is justified by the cliche. Immorality attracts immorality.

Evidence

a) Burt Pugach, a rich US lawyer threw acid to his love Linda Riss when she was to marry someone else. After completing jail terms Burt married Linda. But he was eventually poisoned by his maid.
b) US destroyed USSR to form Russia in the name of Crushing communism. Today communist gen is destroying all their institutions.

⛔3. Love is blind

a) Continuing with the def. of 2(a), the experience of love itself needs seeing a mother figure by the baby’s core.
b) if with a blind eye one perceives a snake as a lifesaver then that life will end.

Evidence

Philip II of Spain married Mary I, the queen of England in 1552 when she was 38, knowing well that she won’t become a mother. Mary faked her pregnancy, then got psychotic, and became bloody Mary, becoming the most brutal queen who burnt protestants’ live on British streets.

⛔4. When life gives you lemons, make lemonades.

a) Lemonade is high in fructose, minus the benefit of the fiber=>Poison.
b) The cliche says to squeeze max profit out of a situation.
e) Profiteering is greed<>pancreatic poison and is genetic.

Evidence

British squeezed Africans through the slave trade, mineral extraction, and land poaching. Obesity is a declared epidemic in Britain today.

⛔5. Time heals all wounds.

a) Any wound(mental or physical) is healed through growth hormone and testosterone, both of which reduce with time.
b) With time nerves around a wound dies, and therefore pain sensitivity reduces.
c) Body doesn’t heal a wound where there is no pain sensitivity.

Evidence: Pakistan raped 47 Lakh Bangladeshi girls in 1971. Bangladesh is depopulating today with fertility dropping from 6 to less than 2.0 in 50 years.

⛔6. Health is wealth.

We have an entire article written on the topic. Check out our article on why “Health is Wealth” is untrue.

⛔7. All’s well that ends well.

This cliche tries to free one up from any sense of failures and setbacks as long as the outcome is favorable. However this cliche also tells us that it is only the outcome that matters at the end of the day, and even if there are some ethical and moral compromises, they are okay.

1. An ending of any pursuit can be favorable only if one a good luck, or one has a good process in place, and persistently pursues the goal following that process.
2. Luck is a chance, that may be with you or may not be with you all the time.
3. Therefore, even if your process was flawed, or there was no process, but you had luck, you would get the desired result. If so, then the cliche says, it is okay to have a good result without any process and just by luck.
4. Furthermore, life is a continuity and nothing ends at anything. For example, even after your school ends, you continue to use the learning from the school for the rest of your life.
5. Processes create a habit that you can always repeat in life. Luck can’t be repeated. Because the outcome of any pursuit is temporary, but the habits are permanent, you may end up believing that it is okay to not have a good process and persistence, as long as a better result is obtained.
6. You may get good marks in school finals by cheating, but if you did not learn the subjects, then those marks won’t be of any use for the rest of your life.

Evidence

1. Sachin Tendulkar, the Indian batting maestro of cricket did not win the world cup of cricket for 22 years of his career. However, he was persistent and eventually ended up winning his last world cup. But by then he had already scored over 95 centuries.
2. Lee Chong Wei, one of the stalwarts of modern badminton won every badminton tournament. He reached three Olympic finals but won three Silver medals. He did not have a good end to his career. However, Lee gave so much more to the sport than so many other Olympic champions.
3. David Lee Edwards won a $27 Million Jackpot Lottery but ended up squandering the entire money in just five years to end up living in slums.
4. Christiano Ronaldo, another great football star of the modern era couldn’t win the world cup, but his contemporary Leonel Messi won the world cup in his final tournament.

Messi, and Tendulkar, had not-so-good endings to their goals for more than 90% of their careers, but their careers gave so much back to them and to the people in terms of value, entertainment, and happiness. Edward had a great ending to his pursuit of winning the lottery due to luck, but because the luck eventually runs out, and every ending including the end of life is also continued, nothing good came out of Edward’s “ending well.”

⛔ 8. Laughter is the best medicine.

It suggests that one should keep laughing irrespective of the situation in life. If one keeps laughing, it works like a medicine and keeps many diseases away. Based on this cliche several clinical trials were done to test Laughter as a potential therapeutics for several illnesses such as diabetes.

1. Medicine is an external intervention given to a patient for the treatment of an illness. (You may find the definition of health, life, death, and illness in the “Health is Wealth” cliche article).
2. When someone laughs, keeping the cliche as a reference, he suggests that he is already a patient and that the reason for laughing is the illness.
3. The treatment is referred to as better management of an illness, where management means less pain. Treatment, therefore, means that one continues to carry the illness, but the consequences of the illness are delayed, and the pain of the illness is less.
4. So the cliche literally suggests one remains ill, laugh at his own illness, and suffers less.
5. Our brain is meant to solve a problem, not to live with the problem and divert its focus from the solution. Hence when one is ill, entire focus, energy, and attention should be to solve the problem.
6. Yes, at times, focussing too much on the problem doesn’t allow the brain to think and innovate and solve it, and diversion works to reset the brain’s reference point, but that is not medicine, but rather a reset, and part of the solution process.
7. Under illness, one remains in low energy, and sad, and laughing is against the brain’s preferred state. Laughing consumes a lot of energy and may actually push the brain towards depression, rather than doing any good.

Evidence

1. Robin Williams, famous Holywood star comedian, and lead actor in movies like Mrs. Doubtfire hanged himself at the age of 63. He stated that he had gotten addicted to cocaine to release stress from doing standup comedy. The drug caused paranoia which finally took his life.
2. Psychologist Clark Hull had a polio attack and had gotten bedridden as early as the age of 24. He then pursued a search for mental health conditions and their reasons, to finally come up with the “Drive Theory”. biological deprivation creates needs. These needs activate drives which then motivate behavior. The resulting behavior is goal-directed since achieving these goals aids in the survival of the organism. He went on to live for 68 years, finding meaning in his life and leaving behind significant advancement in behavioral therapy. Rather than choosing laughter, Carl Hull chooses to research to make his own bedridden life better.

Laughing where there is a reason to laugh is natural to humans, it is neither a medicine nor a food. Laughter is an expression. An expression is a set of body and facial muscle movements, hormonal changes, and nerve conductivity, including some neurotransmitters. We express our feelings through expression. Laughter is an expression of extreme happiness feeling. Feelings and their associative expressions are part of our lives, neither a treatment for illness nor a reason for illness.

⛔9. Love you more than life itself.

As we already have seen that love is a feeling of relief of being alive, after fear of death, which is primal, and which a baby experiences when the baby doesn’t see the mother, and thereafter finds the mother by the side.

If one claims to love someone more than life, then he/she doesn’t love himself because love is the feeling of being alive. Therefore one who says it lies.

⛔10. “Less is more”, “Good things come in small packages”

1. Less blood in the body is a condition called Anemia. Anemia is one of the prime causes of neoplastic cancer and several other diseases.
2. Less cognition and less memory are indicators of impaired mental health. Less cognition results in less empathy, which causes psychopathy.
3. Less rainfall is called draught. Draught may result in underproduction, therefore unavailability of food, and may cause people to die.
4. We all know how fewer Oxygen cylinders and fewer hospital beds in COVID-19 lead to more deaths.

How less is less, how much more is more, and what is good, and bad depends upon the respective reference points, measurement units, baseline, and so on. Yes, having fewer things to take care of makes one focus more on the existing things. But then no one can say taking less care of children means taking more care or giving less blood during transfusion means giving more blood, and so on.

In the modern days, this cliche is extensively used by lazy brains to justify their laziness. This is also being used by the profiteering corporates to justify their less service to the customers.

Often we see online articles and books which are small, thin, containing fewer words, and full of cliches such as this. “Less is less and more is more.” They are by definition opposite words, and two opposite words are never the same.

This is like saying ‘North is South’, ‘Warm is Cold’, ‘Violence is Peace.” No, they are not.

⛔11. Make a long story short.

This is like the Cliche 10. A story is a set of events woven into a plot, where there is a beginning and an end. The story contains characters, their interactions, their journey, dialogue, background, and several other such components.

There are short stories such as Panchatantra and then there are long stories such as Novels. The way short stories can’t be dragged longer, the same way the long stories can’t be squeezed shorter. When the long stories are squeezed shorter, several details go missing, and the audience of the story may end up misinterpreting the story or its message.

Evidence

Let’s narrate the Hindu religious epic Ramayana shortly. Rama, his wife Sita, and his brother were sent to Jungle after Rama’s marriage to their father King Dashratha. Evil king Ravana abducted Sita. Rama made an army of apes and attacked Lanka, Ravan’s empire, defeated Ravana, and brought Sita back.

Ramayana is a book that teaches morality and makes you think about responsibilities and accountabilities. It puts you in the situation of duality where you find it hard to decide between good and evil. It narrates Duties, rights, love, jealousy, and several other facades. The short story teaches you nothing.

Hence, either don’t consume a story, if you don’t have time and interest(and need) to consume the story, or consume the story in its actual form(long or short). Do not read the summary and feel like you read a novel. That is a sign of a lazy shortcut brain. The lazy brain always leads you to trouble.

⛔12. There is nothing either good or bad.

We live in a society, which is governed by a moral code of conduct. Societies are part of the nation that is governed by the law of the nation. A law not only defines the do’s and don’ts but also explains the reasons behind it.

For example, the First law of morality is that “Every being has the equal right to live to the full potential of life.” Thus killing any being is not good. A criminal and murderer may use the cliche to justify his crime, but do you really think there is nothing bad in robbing, killing, or raping another individual?

In the same way, arranging shelters for the homeless, arranging food for the hungry, and providing medicines for the ill who can’t afford them are good because they satisfy one’s moral duty to help others to live whenever one can. So, you can never claim that donating blood to a patient who has met an accident and lost several bottles of blood is bad.

There are of course good, and bad. Depending upon the societies, moral, social, cultural, and ethical values may change, but there are always the ones. For instance in India, butchering cows is considered bad because we worship cows. This is not the case in the western countries. So, a Westerner can justify that “there is no good or bad in butchering cows.” A rather specific statement would be “in western countries, cow meat is not considered bad, but in India it is considered bad.”

⛔13. Good things come to those who wait.

Things, good, bad, or ugly are life-less, immobile. Immobile life-less by definitions can not move. One that can not move can neither come to you nor go away from you.

You get the good and bad of life based on your actions. If you pursue to create a great company for the future and work daily relentlessly towards that pursuit, then one day you will likely create that company. However, if you wait for 20 years, a company will not get automatically created and come to you.

Of course, patience is the key to any pursuit. However, patience doesn’t mean waiting. Patience means not being hurried or worried about the result.

⛔14. Opportunity doesn’t knock twice

1. Life is a continuity. We are governed by our habits. Nothing we do, we do once. If you carefully look into your life, patterns are repeated over and over again.
2. Patterns in life appear based on the way your brain functions. Some keep attracting the wrong people over and over again in life. Some keep cheating people over and over again.
3. Opportunity means having a strong possibility of getting extraordinary benefits in the current pursuit, mission, or task.
4. The very reason you are doing what you are doing is that it is a pattern in your brain, and you will continue to do similar tasks. Every time you repeat a task, you get better at the task. In fact with this theory, logically you will always have a similar opportunity over and over in your life, and your chances of achieving success in those opportunities will increase over a period of time.

This cliche is created by sales and marketing to create a fear of missing out(FOMO) to trick a customer into taking a quick decision. If your process is good and you are persistent, opportunities would also be persistent.

Evidence

During COVID-19, Acculi Labs, the company that created Lyfas was offered investment from the top three investors in India. We took the investment. However, one of the investors ended up disrespecting one of our junior teammates. We returned the investment amount. The investors told us “You are killing the company, this opportunity won’t come to you again.”

Two years from that time, 113 investors came forward and invested $150k, twice the investment amount we returned through an instrument called PAIO. (Read the news here).

So, opportunities keep coming to those who continue to work consistently.

⛔15. Every dog has a day

1. Wolves are devolved into dogs for easy food.
2. Dogs live lesser than wolves.
3. Dogs are collared pets and are often used to feel powerful and feel good about possessing and controlling another life.
4. This cliche is used by people who are currently hating their current situation but are not in a position to take action. They remind themselves that they will get their opportunity to take revenge in the future.

Interestingly, revenge is a negative emotion that the brain has to keep alive till the revenge is done. This is one of the most powerful emotions and takes significant energy for the brain to keep the desire for revenge alive. With so much energy being exhausted into revenge and desire for revenge, several other organs, cells, and functions of the body and brain cease to get the needed energy and thus turn off. Turning off bodily functions is turning off genes. Turning off genes is devolution. And devolution reduces one’s life expectancy.

Hence, even uttering this cliche can turn one into a dog, collared, controlled, and living less due to genetic devolution.

Evidence

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbour during the second world war, killing several US navies, the US did not attack back Japan immediately. However, they dropped two atomic bombs on Japan Hiroshima, and Nagasaki in 1945 to extinct exponentially more innocent citizens, like a mad pack of dogs.

The US kept getting into wars like Cold War, Gulf Rar, Iraq War, and Vietnam War, Afghan War. Once a nation devolves itself into a dog, there is no evolution up to the wolves. Japan did not have to fight another war after the World War. Today US economy is trembling due to overspending on wars.

🛎️Warning

Describe theory and history, narrate facts and examples, then conclude with a cliche to remember the entire thread. Don’t start with a cliche to justify your actions or use cliches as theories.

Those who live by cliches, die by cliches.

Conclusion

There is a significant degradation of mental capacity, and cognitive capabilities over time. It is now a known fact that the human brain is not getting better but shrinking. It is estimated that in the last 1500 years alone brain mass of European females has reduced by 300gm.

With mental capacity, attention span, cognitive quality, memory, abstract and lateral polymath association reducing linearly with every generation, common people with lazy brain finds it easy to justify their acts with cliches, without ever evaluating the cliches, and reviewing the history and science behind the cliches.

You may observe that the post also ends with a cliche. It narrates a complete theory around how to analyze a cliche, how to find evidence, how to find a correlation, and why cliches are wrong with multiple examples, with science, history, and statistics as various domains.

This post took me about 6 hours to write. You may read in 1 minute, and then you may remember only the last line, which is also a cliche.

The learning you must derive from the post is that:
a) Never start from cliches.
b) Never base your actions based on a cliche.
c) Critically assess the cliches.
d) Never use cliche without context.

Reader’s Comments

“Its a cliche that most cliche are true, but like most cliches, that cliche is untrue”

-Stephen Fry

Its a great clumsy and unoriginal
thing for anyone to get attention and its damn easy to understand this, it demonstrate unique thought but so common if you illustrate even with basic structure of storytelling.

We humans are always in pursuit of happiness. Yes, it’s a cliche, and yet we still chase it. So many greatest stories end on a happy note or hacking database or killing bad guy or winning over loosing or what not.

Cliches kills wisdom and keep human alive.

Prashant Kamani