Don’t even try not to deceive yourself. You’ll do it again in a minute
We not only use self-deception to live our lives, we believe in our lies
Self-deception
We not only use self-deception to live our lives, we believe in our lies
The story of Anna Sorokin, aka Anna Delvey, began in Domodedovo, a town close to Moscow, Russia. When she was a teenager, her family moved to Germany. Then she lived and worked in several countries in Europe, and in 2013 she came to New York, where she started to tell people that she was an heiress of a German billionaire. Many people believed her and lent her significant sums of money. What made her so persuasive? She apparently believed in what she said.
Not much is known about her childhood, but it probably wasn’t particularly happy. Children devise different life strategies if they feel insignificant. One of them is to create a false reality, in which the kid is a king or queen or an heiress of a billionaire, and convince themselves that this is true. So, people believed Anna Delvey not because she wasn’t a gifted actor — she told the truth. At least she sincerely believed in it at that moment.
It’…