The Lies We Live By: Essays on Love, Power, and the Age of Anxiety

What does it mean to live, love, and make meaning in a world of endless choice and diminishing certainty?

In this uncompromising collection of essays, Raymond peels back the comforting stories we tell ourselves about love, sex, work, faith, power, and mortality, exposing the paradoxes at the heart of modern life.

Like Montaigne before him, the “I” who speaks here is both author and device – a witness to the contradictions we all embody. From the quiet devotion of a husband caring for his wife with Alzheimer’s, to the performance of grief on social media, to the way we confuse freedom with having too many choices, these essays refuse easy answers. Instead, they confront the raw, uncomfortable truths that shape our age:

• Love is less about butterflies and more about carpentry.

• Hypocrisy may be the most honest thing about us.

• Consumerism is our most practiced religion.

• Freedom is the one thing we want but cannot survive having.

• Hope, our most celebrated virtue, may also be our greatest thief.

Witty, lyrical, and unsparing, The Lies We Live By is not a book of solutions but of clarity. It’s an invitation to see ourselves as we really are.

For readers of Joan Didion, Alain de Botton, and David Foster Wallace, this collection is a mirror held up to the age of distraction, demanding we face what we’d rather avoid.