Bullshit: The Opposite of Real Life

by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

Making Real Choices and Living Without the Bullshit

Everything you read on this site or in my books is about learning to live a REAL life where you can actually be free to think like yourself, feel like yourself, do what you need to do, and be true.

The opposite of living like this is to give into BULLSHIT – either the bullshit that you hypnotise yourself with because of underlying shame, guilt, and/or trauma and how it makes you hold back and hesitate from real action or because of the bullshit that the world tries to make you believe so you doubt yourself and become passive.

Let’s start a few simple definitions from the get-go as we explore this in more detail (based on the ideas in Shadow Life: Freedom from Bullshit in an Unreal World):

Bullshit isn’t just what other people are doing – it’s about the unreal things you’re tolerating even though you don’t need to because of a fragmented relationship with yourself. It’s anything that you keep buying into that causes you to become fragmented and to separate you from wholeness.

That’s it. Simple. Deadly.

Bullshit is the noise that keeps you from hearing your inner signal and the nudges and obvious next steps that real life requires you to take to move towards wholeness:

It’s the performance you put on to win approval, applause, and appreciation (because you’ve confused them for ‘love’).

It’s the story you keep telling yourself because the truth feels too confronting and you need to keep hiding the real you in the Shadow Territory behind the comfortable and familiar mask of the Ego.

To make matters worse, most people are living knee-deep in this type of bullshit and calling it ‘normal’ life when it’s actually far from it.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Life is short and the opposite of life is bullshit - Shadow Life

Bullshit: What We’ll Cover in this Article

Making Real Choices and Living Without the Bullshit
Real Life vs Bullshit
Final Thought: You Already Know

Real Life vs Bullshit

Let’s break this down a little so it’s easier to understand and digest:

Real life is rooted in presence, truth, action, and connection.
Bullshit is rooted in avoidance, illusion, fear, and performance.

Bullshit is the real pandemic that has taken over our societies and it’s created a situation where most people are managing their lives instead of living them:

They’re performing according identities that they act out to try and hide from themselves, hustling for worth, pretending to be ‘fine’, and wondering why nothing feels quite right.

(It doesn’t feel quite right because they’re living in the Void and hiding behind a mask that they forgot they were wearing).

The simple truth is that bullshit doesn’t feel right because it isn’t right – it’s a deviation from truth and only when we’re aligned with the truth (by 1. uncovering the truth, and then, 2) acting according to the truth) can we feel natural and real.

Here’s some more ways that this kind of bullshit can mess up your life and make it unreal:

1. Bullshit Is the Mask You Wear

We all wear masks in order to survive ‘out there’ but the problem is when we forget we put one on in the first place.

For example, you wear the “nice guy” mask because you think it keeps you safe; you wear the “confident woman” mask because you think the real you isn’t enough; you wear the infallible “professional adult” mask because God forbid anyone sees your inner chaos and realises that you’re an actual human being.

These masks aren’t evil or ‘wrong’ – they’re adaptations that we usually put on because of some underlying emotional ‘stuff’ that makes us ashamed about who we really are.

Unfortunately, the more dependent you become on the masks that you wear, the more they keep you in performative cycles where connection, creativity, and courage get replaced with bland predictability.

The more you perform, the less real you feel, and the less real you feel, the less you live.

2. Bullshit Is the Lie You Tell Yourself

The most dangerous lies are the ones you believe because you keep filtering reality through them so much that it changes the way you perceive yourself and things:

“I can’t do that” (when you haven’t even tried to find out yet).
“It’s too late for me” (when it might not be)
“I just need to be realistic” (when “realistic” is being used to set imaginary barriers and to limit potential instead of possibility).
“This is fine” (when it’s not).

Bullshit lives in these micro-justifications (which are called self-limiting beliefs in coaching) and, every time you choose them, you get further from who you really are and deeper and deeper into the unreality of friction, frustration, and misery.

Here’s the thing, though: you can feel when you’re being unreal with yourself – every time you settle; every time you go against your gut; every time you water yourself down so someone else feels more comfortable.

That’s the whisper of truth beneath the bullshit calling to you from your realness which has been buried in the shadows.

Stop pretending you don’t hear it and start doing something real instead of listening to your own BS.

3. Bullshit Is the Role You Play

You’re not your job; you’re not your trauma; you’re not your social media bio.

Despite this, many of us out there in the world today live as though their roles are their reality (even when they often conjured up the names of these ‘roles’ themselves many times in accordance with whatever their ego – which is also bullshit – required).

The role of “Provider”, the role of “Victim”, the role of “Hero”, the role of “Success Story”, or [anything else you can think of] -these roles are fine if you know they’re temporary but the second you identify with them, you start shrinking to fit the costume and end up filtering actual reality through the bullshit.

When we attach to roles like this, they become prisons that restrict your behaviour, mute your voice, and dilute your fire.

One day, you end up looking around one day and asking yourself:

“Who the hell even am I?”

That’s the cost of tolerated bullshit.

4. Bullshit Is the Ego Playing God

The ego wants control but your realness needs truth:

When the ego is running the show, everything becomes a game of survival and unnecessary competition and endless ‘seeking’ (in an attempt to fill the Void of being disconnected from the truth about ourselves and life in the first place):

Can I look good enough?
Can I win their approval?
Can I prove I’m better?
Can I avoid shame?

(Realness stops questioning the self and starts saying “I AM” instead of asking “Can I?” or “Am I?”).

When you’re stuck in this kind of questioning loop, your real life is happening without you.

The ego plays a rigged game and calls it identity but the real you isn’t in competition – the real you just is.

In short, the ego creates bullshit so it can feel in control but it’s always a false sense of safety which is just nervous system clampdown masquerading as confidence.

To paraphrase Shadow Life:

Bullshit is not simply the lies we tell, it’s the life we construct to avoid feeling the truth.

And truth?

Truth is neutral but it’ll change you if you work with it.

5. Bullshit Is Culturally Rewarded (But Spiritually Deadening)

Here’s the irony: the more bullshit you tolerate, the more society tends to reward you because society itself is bullshit in many ways.

Maybe you follow all the ‘rules’ of the game:

You’re productive.
You’re nice.
You’re respectable.
You’re a team player.

But underneath it all? You’re numb, you’re tired, you’re disconnected, and you’re full of silent rage and unexpressed grief as the real you SCREAMS for your attention and you keep pretending it’s not saying anything.

That’s the price. You trade your realness for acceptance and security and wonder why you feel fake and unreal (as though you’re not expressing anything true).

Bullshit isn’t punished by society – it’s rewared.

It’ll make you feel like you’re being punished by your soul, though, as you’ll always feel that friction, frustration, and eventual misery of not living according to what you know deep down is true.

6. Bullshit Is a Choice

Read that again because it’s the main point of this article:

Bullshit is a CHOICE.

It might not feel like it because maybe you feel trapped, exhausted, confused, or out of options…but bullshit is always a choice because truth is always available.

That doesn’t mean it’s going to be ‘easy’ to start making different choices because the truth is usually quiet. Subtle. Inconvenient.

But, nevertheless, it’s there.

Waiting.

And the moment you stop tolerating your own nonsense, things will start to shift.

Again, to paraphrase Shadow Life:

All real change begins with the decision to stop tolerating what you know isn’t real.

You don’t need a 10-year plan – you just need a single, honest moment with yourself that puts you back on a real path.

That’s the start (and where it ends is in many ways up to you).

7. Realness Is Risky, But Worth It

People stay in bullshit because it’s familiar, safe, and predictable (even though real life is often none of these things).

It might be slowly killing your soul, but at least it’s what you know, right?

Realness, on the other hand, requires risk:

You might lose approval.
You might piss people off.
You might have to change everything.

And yet… it’s worth it because on the other side of all that fear is actual aliveness and that’s what most people are truly starving for.

You want to feel alive?

Burn the script, drop the mask, and start telling the truth.

Your life will change faster than you believe.

8. Signs You’re Living in Bullshit

Let’s finish by being at least a little practical…

Here’s how you know bullshit is running your life:

You feel resentful but say nothing.
You say “Yes” when you mean “No”.
You live on autopilot.
You’re always ‘fine’.
You fantasise about escape more than you take any real action.
You avoid silence because you’re afraid of what it might say.

If any of these hit, don’t panic – just tell the truth.

To yourself, first, and then to the world by extension as you become less fragmented within yourself.

That’s where real life starts.

9. How to Burn Through Bullshit (Without Burning Out)

Burning through bullshit doesn’t mean destroying your life in a fit of rage – it means reclaiming your life one clear-headed decision at a time.

Start here (this is the 3-step process I use in my coaching containers with clients):

Awareness (Deconstruct Ego): Name what’s bullshit in your life and face up to yourself about it. Get honest and be ruthless in a tender way.
Acceptance: Feel what you feel. Grieve it. Forgive yourself for tolerating it and then figure out what you’ve been hiding about yourself and the world behind all the bullshit you’ve now let go of.
Action: Change something. Say the hard thing. Set the boundary. Do the opposite of the old pattern by acting like the bullshit-free, realest version of yourself.

Awareness, Acceptance, and Action. Simple. Not easy. But it works every time (book a call with me if you want to start transforming your own life).

Bullshit is about seeing yourself and life as something it isn't and then not living as who you were made to be.

Final Thought: You Already Know

Most of the time, you already know what the bullshit is because our realness never goes anywhere – it just gets hidden sometimes.

You might’ve even known for a while that there’s some bullshit in your life that needs changing (which is why you landed on this page) but knowing isn’t enough – what matters is this:

Will you keep tolerating what separates you from your wholeness? Or will you choose realness even if it costs you your comfort?

That’s the edge and it’s where real life begins.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S If you’re interested in coaching and you’re ready to start living your real life, then book a free call with me and get moving right away (not a ‘sales’ call – a literal coaching session).

Trust: A Manual for Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace is a book about learning to return to your realness by cultivating trust in yourself and trust in life.

It contains practical exercises and dedicated meditations (Transformational Bridges) to take you DEEP in knowing yourself and life.

This book will answer many of the questions you have growing REAL and flowing towards wholeness. It covers everything from shame to addiction to the unconscious mind and synchronicity (and way more).

Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness is a book designed to help you look at your life from the inside-out so that you can stop holding yourself back and go get what you really want.

It contains 166 practical ‘Revolutions’ for awareness and over 8,000 Self-Guidance Questions for you to uncover new insight about yourself, the world, and reality that you can translate into action and start building your real life on the realest possible foundation.

Shadow Life is an exploration of the human shadow and the hidden side of our personalities. It looks at the masks we wear, where these masks come from, and how we can take them off.

The book explores how we can better manage our relationships with shame, guilt, and trauma in order to remove the Mask that the world has asked us to wear (and that we forgot we were wearing) so we can live an authentic life with less drama, chaos, or BS whilst we’re still around.

Download EGO/SHADOW/TRUST - a free guide to transformation that will walk you through the vital stages of Awareness, Acceptance, and Action with practical strategies to implement right away.

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Real Always Works

Making Real Choices and Living Without the Bullshit

Bullshit: What We’ll Cover in this Article