Say a person tells a lie — claiming they just worked out, when they never actually went to the gym. That lie, false as it is, still points to something concrete — what it wants you to believe is “I really did go work out,” a real thing that either happened or didn’t. This lie stands opposite the truth, and depends on the truth to even exist.
It’s a specific, debunkable claim — check the gym’s camera footage or attendance record, and you’ll know whether it’s true or false. Whatever it’s covering up is, underneath, a perfectly clear matter of whether something happened or not.
But take a different case — a slogan someone repeats constantly, like “be true to your own heart” or “live the life you want.” Say it, and even the speaker themselves couldn’t tell you exactly which event in their own life this maps onto — did they quit a job to do something, did they turn down some invitation. This line isn’t covering up something that did or didn’t happen. There’s no specific event holding it up from behind at all — pry it open, and it’s empty.
Think about how this kind of empty phrase reproduces itself, and you’ll find it works quite differently from a lie. A lie is a one-time intrusion — say it once, get caught once, and it’s hard to reuse. But once an empty phrase proves useful, pleasant to the ear, acceptable to everyone, it gets copied endlessly, showing up in more and more situations that should have called for something specific.
Over time, the first instinct that surfaces when someone opens their mouth isn’t how to say the thing clearly — it’s whether there’s some ready-made, impressive-sounding line that can be slapped on top. Bring up a trip, for instance, and what comes tumbling out is “so healing,” “the vibe was immaculate” — while what they actually saw at the time, what actually crossed their mind, they can’t quite say.
Once this substitution takes hold, what deteriorates isn’t just a few phrases — it’s a person’s entire capacity to describe real experience. Because after long enough relying on lines that never need to correspond to anything specific, when a real event actually happens, one with complicated details, they no longer know how to put it into precise, unambiguous words. The only vocabulary they can call up has already been worn smooth, able to fit onto anything, and having never really said anything at all.
If this deterioration stopped at “expression has become hollow,” it might not be so bad — at least you’d still remember what you actually went through, just clumsy at putting it into words. But think about it more closely, and things turn out not to be so simple.
Language isn’t only a tool for talking to other people — it’s also how you remember what happened to you in the first place. After something happens, a person only manages to lodge it firmly in memory by continuously retelling it to themselves, in words, inside their own head.
But if a person has grown used to describing something that genuinely happened using a ready-made phrase, that phrase will show up, again and again, every single time they revisit the memory. Tell it once, use the phrase once. Tell it ten times, use the phrase ten times. Say a relationship ends — the first time you mention it to someone, you might still bring up a specific night, a specific line that left you cold inside.
But every time you’re asked about it after that, what comes out is “we just weren’t compatible,” “it wasn’t meant to be.” Slowly, the original, real shape of what happened — the specific images, the specific smell, the specific swell of emotion — gets covered over, bit by bit, by this repeatedly used phrase, until one day, when you try to recall it again, what jumps to mind first isn’t the night itself anymore. It’s the phrase “weren’t compatible.”
When a person believes they’ve always remembered something, what they’re actually remembering is only the ready-made phrase about it. The details of the thing as it actually happened, the parts that could never be compressed into a stock phrase, had already quietly leaked away, through countless retellings, long before that.
Then, one day, wanting to earnestly tell the whole thing, in full, to someone who genuinely cares — that’s when they discover the only thing in hand is that same overused phrase, worn smooth of every edge. The way that thing actually was is already gone, unrecoverable.
If a lie only pollutes one specific exchange — said, then debunked, or forgotten, the damage a one-time thing — then an empty phrase erodes something further, spreading from the capacity to express all the way into memory itself. It doesn’t just leave you unable to describe something clearly. It quietly replaces the way that thing genuinely happened with a ready-made description of it.
And then, one day, when you truly want to say something important clearly, fully, you discover the only thing you can summon is a pile of phrases that merely sound like they mean something. What’s even more unsettling is that what you yourself recall might, by then, be only these phrases — not the thing itself at all.