I could write a blog post tomorrow claiming your phone notifications are quietly rewiring your brain to keep you broke. A confident tone, a few cherry-picked studies, some scary jargon. It would go viral. Guaranteed. And if I kept writing posts like that for a year or two, I’d eventually believe it myself.

That’s not a hypothetical. That’s how brainrot works. And a 67-page philosophy book explained it to me better than years of scrolling, arguing, and forming opinions ever did.

The book is On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt. It’s thin enough to read in one sitting, dense enough to rethink your entire relationship with truth. What Frankfurt does is draw a line between lying and bullshitting, and that distinction changes everything.

The Road Analogy

Imagine truth is a road. A person telling you the truth is driving on that road. They’re giving you an exact account of reality as they experience it.

A liar is driving adjacent to the road. They can see it. They know it exists, they know exactly where it goes and how many lanes it has. But they choose not to drive on it because they have an agenda.

Maybe they want to get ahead at work. Maybe they want something from you. The point is, a liar still knows what’s real.

A bullshitter? They’re sitting at home, not even near the road, telling you how wide it is, where it curves, what color the asphalt is. All made up.

They have no relationship with truth or falsehood. They’re not even playing the game.

truth liar bullshitter
The liar drives alongside the road — he still sees it. The bullshitter never left the house.

This hit me hard because I realized how much of public life runs on this exact dynamic.

Why BS Is More Dangerous Than Lying

Here’s the counterintuitive part. You’d think lying is the worst thing someone can do to truth. It’s not.

When I lie to my mom and say “I’m fine” when I’m actually sick, I haven’t lost my grip on reality. I still know I’m sick. I’m just choosing not to tell her because she’s 10,000 kilometers away and knowing would only make her worried and helpless.

A benign lie. We all do it. It doesn’t detach us from what’s true.

But bullshit is a completely different animal. A bullshitter isn’t trying to hide reality. They’re not even concerned with it. The only thing a BS statement serves is the moment itself.

If I want to borrow money from you, I’ll say I have none. Doesn’t matter what’s actually in my pocket. If I want to impress you, I’ll claim I have thousands. Same pocket, zero relationship with reality.

And here’s where it gets dark. Every BS statement you make is a dot. You make another one, then another, building a path that leads further and further from the road. At some point you’re so detached from reality that you completely lose your ability to recognize it. Your critical thinking doesn’t degrade. It evaporates.

I’m not exaggerating. Imagine me spending two years writing posts about how your notifications are engineered to keep you poor. First I’d say it for views. Then I’d say it because the engagement felt good.

Then I’d say it because I believed it. And then I’d be impossible to live with. Every article would look like propaganda. Every expert would feel like a shill. My brain would have lost the hardware for critical thinking entirely.

That’s brainrot. And it doesn’t start with conspiracy theories. It starts with casual, everyday indifference to truth.

Where BS Comes From

Two places, mainly.

First: public life. Any situation where you’re required to make statements about things you understand nothing about is a BS factory.

Think about it. Politicians who only understand voter behavior are suddenly making declarations about biology, neuroscience, space engineering, and climate science. They won an election, not a degree. But now they’re commenting on every domain of human knowledge with absolute confidence.

That’s not lying. That’s not truth. That’s just noise dressed up in a suit.

Second: the Dunning-Kruger effect. In the beginning, when you have very little knowledge about something, your confidence is at its peak. That’s where you’re most likely to make BS statements.

peak BS zone confidence knowledge →
Confidence spikes highest exactly where you know the least — the danger zone for talking nonsense.

You don’t know much, someone asks you a question, you want to sound smart, so you fabricate. Not a lie. Not the truth. Just verbal filler that makes you feel competent for 30 seconds.

I’ve caught myself doing this. Two chais deep at a family dinner, an uncle asks how the economy actually works, and I start talking with way more confidence than my knowledge warrants. It feels good in the moment. Everyone nods. Then I go home and realize I basically made up half of what I said. Not maliciously. Just… carelessly.

Three Things I Now Do Differently

Frankfurt’s framework gave me a mental filter. Three rules I run things through now.

One. Before I make any statement, I ask myself: is this true, is this a lie, or is it neither? If it’s neither, I stop talking. Simple as that. Most BS dies at the moment you refuse to let it leave your mouth.

Two. I don’t have opinions about everything. One human cannot understand every single thing on this planet. If you ask me about the Israel-Palestine conflict, I’ll tell you I don’t understand it well enough to have a stance.

Neutral is a valid position. “I don’t know” is not a weakness. It’s a boundary that protects your brain from rotting.

Three. I read more. Books force you to sit with complexity. They don’t let you scroll past a contradiction. You have to hold multiple ideas in your head simultaneously, and that’s the exact exercise that builds critical thinking. Every book you read is a firmware update for your bullshit detector.

The Realization That Stuck

For years I thought the biggest threat to truth was dishonesty. People lying, cheating, hiding facts. Turns out that’s the wrong enemy entirely.

A liar still lives in reality. They just don’t want you to see it. A bullshitter has moved out and built their own. And if you spend enough time in a world where people speak without caring whether what they say is true, you stop being able to tell the difference yourself.

The most valuable thing I have isn’t anything I know. It’s the ability to look at a claim and ask: does this person care about what’s true? Because if they don’t, nothing they say matters. And if I stop caring, nothing I say will matter either.