We’re Living in an Age of Exaggeration, and It’s Killing Our Ability to Tell the Truth

Fridays are built for hyperbole, I told a friend recently.

"This week lasted an eternity." "I barely made it through the week." "TGIF, Thank God it's Friday.” Consider how hyperbolic we all become on Friday. The weekend gleams ahead like a mirage, language loosens its tie, and many of us talk like survivors of a shipwreck on Friday. Maybe exaggeration once defined Friday, the harmless overstatement of fatigue and relief. Now it’s everywhere. Every day is a Friday. Every utterance inflated, every gesture broadcast. We live in a culture where everything is epic, catastrophic, unprecedented. Nothing simply happens anymore; it erupts.

Hyperbole used to be play. Now it feels like pressure, the constant need to perform the intensity of being alive.

The fear beneath the noise

Ernest Becker, in The Denial of Death, wrote that human beings build “hero systems” to shield themselves from the terror of mortality. We invent new gods, religions, nations, careers, and now, personal brands, each a small monument against the disappearance of our individuality. Seen this way, our exaggerated age becomes a kind of theology: every influencer post, every moral panic, every viral outrage is a plea for symbolic immortality. Each one says: I am outraged. I exist. See me before I vanish forever.

Byung-Chul Han refers to ours as the era of the “achievement subject.” In The Burnout Society, he observes that no master need enslave us anymore; we willingly exhaust ourselves in the name of freedom.“You can do anything” quietly becomes “you must do everything.”Our overstatement of self, our curated exhaustion, our heroic busyness, is not expression but defense. To rest is to vanish; to be serene is to be forgotten.

The spectacle and its ghosts

Neil Postman once warned, in his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, that television would turn public life into entertainment. He was right, but the prophecy was too small. The internet made entertainment the air we breathe. Now we are all broadcasters in an endless carnival of emotion, trading sincerity for spectacle because attention, not truth, is the last remaining currency.

Guy Debord named it decades ago in The Society of the Spectacle, a world where what is lived must be seen to exist. A protest isn’t real until it’s posted. Grief doesn’t count until it trends. Even our silence is curated, optimized for the algorithm.

Another French social critic, Jean Baudrillard, went further: we have left reality behind entirely, wandering a hall of mirrors he called simulation. Here, representation no longer reflects life; it replaces it. Politics becomes theater. Identity becomes brand. Outrage becomes entertainment. We no longer ask whether something is true, only whether it is trending or engaging enough people.

And nowhere is this logic more visible than in the American temper: agitated, self-mythologizing, permanently adrenalized. We’ve mistaken volatility for vitality. Two political realities, equally hysterical, face each other like rival faiths. Every election is “the last one.” Every opposing candidate is an existential threat. Every other headline portends the imminent apocalypse. We are a nation stuck in a permanent hyperbolic battle, overstimulated, overstated, waiting for a weekend of promise that never arrives.

The lies we tell ourselves

Sam Harris, in Lying, wrote that every falsehood, even the small, social kind, is a betrayal of reality. To exaggerate is to lie softly, to sculpt truth until it gleams. But in an economy of attention, exaggeration becomes not vice but survival. You can’t go viral without distorting yourself.

Harris calls truth “a moral compass,” the quiet instrument that points us back toward what is. But the compass has been magnetized by emotion. We prefer the vivid over the true. We no longer crave understanding, only stimulation.

Social media, in this sense, is less a mirror than an accelerant. It rewards the heat of feeling, not the light of thought. Anger travels faster than accuracy; certainty outperforms sincerity. We scroll ourselves into a stupor of moral excitement. We call it connection, but it feels more like combustion.

America has always embraced exaggeration. It's an intrinsic part of the frontier myth, the self-made man, the shining city on a hill. But now the old optimism curdles into cultural anxiety. We’ve turned manifest destiny inward. There are no new continents left, so we colonize our own emotions.

Toward a smaller truth

Hyperbole isn’t the enemy. It’s the weather of language. The real danger is our loss of perspective, and the collapse of irony, humility, and play. We no longer exaggerate about reality; we exaggerate instead of it.

Simone Weil once wrote that “absolute unmixed attention is prayer.” In an age drunk on self-expression, attention itself becomes a moral act, a kind of secular reverence. To look closely, to listen quietly, is to refuse the spell of spectacle.

Viktor Frankl, who found meaning in a place designed to erase it, said our freedom lies not in circumstance but in response. If exaggeration is our condition, then restraint, deliberate understatement, might be our rebellion. The cure for hyperbole isn’t silence but sincerity. Not withdrawal from reality, but bearing witness to it.

The Saturday soul

Fridays will always belong to hyperbole, the hallowed drama of exhaustion and relief. But Saturdays might be for something else. Simplicity. For slow mornings. For coffee without commentary or politics. For a conversation that doesn’t need a wider audience. For noticing that life, uncaptioned, is not “amazing” or “game-changing.” It’s simply enough. We don’t need to keep declaring the end of the world is nigh. We just need to notice, with some astonishment, that it hasn’t ended yet.