Your interest in television is true. Your interest in reality television is true. Your interest in true-crime television is true. However, your interest in gritty prestige crime dramas that expose the socioeconomic complexities and ethical ambiguities within the justice system? That’s where your interest lies.

Still, your interest in your fellow-humans is true. Your interest in their experiences, troubles, and innermost dreams is true. Your interest in alleviating their suffering wherever it arises is true. But your interest in nearly anyone’s genuine answer to the question “How are you?”—total lies.

Your interest in food is true. Your interest in getting the recipe from a friend who cooked you an incredible meal is true. But your interest in separating eggs, stirring continuously, sifting or spooning or levelling flour—in short, your interest in baking—is a lie, although your interest in baked goods remains very much true. To be perfectly honest, your interest in food, now that your mother-in-law has given you a five-hundred-page book on the history of saffron, has become a lie.

Your interest in going to a museum when you visit a new city is true, as long as you spend less than an hour there (including the gift shop). Your interest in becoming a sustaining member of a museum in your own city is true, because your interest in attending that museum’s member night where they serve free hors d’œuvres is true. But passing all of this off as an interest in fine art is a lie.

Your interest in fishing is true, in as much as it’s an interest in staring abstractedly over a body of water, mostly in silence. Literal fish are optional, true, but that doesn’t mean the interest lies.

Your interest in seeming well read is true. Your interest in being able to toss an Alexander Pope quotation or an offhand fact about the history of saffron into a conversation is true. But your interest in reading is a lie.

However, your interest in reading design magazines and scrolling feeds of beautiful homes is true. Your interest in planning the thoughtful details that would transform your home into a stylish, orderly oasis is true. But your interest in completing any aspect of a redecorating scheme that would require you to leave your couch is a lie.

After reading the design magazines, your interest in becoming a carpenter is true, but only to the extent that you’d be interested in modestly admitting, “Oh, actually, I built that,” about cool tables and cabinets. Otherwise, given your total lack of patience when assembling IKEA furniture, your interest in carpentry lies.

As a general rule, your interests lie in the same places where your strengths lie. If, for example, you tell yourself that you have an interest in gardening, you will discover that that’s an area in which your strengths are lying—you cannot keep plants alive. Where strengths are lying, interests can’t help but lie, too.

That’s why your interests lie so much at the gym. Yes, your interest in being fit and living to a ripe old age is true. Even your interest in wearing soft, stretchy clothes every day, as if you might, at any given moment, pop over to the gym, is true. But your interest in actually working out lies. Because, when faced with literal weights and the expectation that you might actually lift them, it quickly becomes clear that, at the gym, your will power lies.

Instead, try getting in a few extra reps of lifting the remote, since, as previously discussed, your interest in television remains very true. ♦