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Idiom: A life of its own
A good rule of thumb in life is you should never tell a lie.
A lie tends to take on a life of its own if you are not careful.
One lie leads to another lie, which leads to one more and so on, until your lies have taken on lives of their own and you can no longer control them.
If a person lies often enough even, they may not be able to tell the difference between what is the truth and what is a lie.
That’s the way it goes when someone decides to live a lie.
It grows and changes.
It acts as if it is alive, even though it isn’t.
Once something takes on a life of its own, it is almost impossible to control it.
Just ask Jimmy McNulty in the fifth season of the HBO drama series The Wire.
His lie took on a life of its own the minute he started it.
Lies are not the only things that take on a life of their own, though.
Big cities like New York and Tokyo are like living, breathing animals.
A thing such as a city takes on a life of its own when it becomes uncontrollable. It acts as if it, itself, is alive, even though it isn’t.
There are so many things going on in any large metropolis that nobody can control.
To control something, you need to know what’s going on, and there is so much activity in a city that nobody has a good handle on it.
Viral videos are another example of things that take on a life of their own.
Sure, you can create a viral video, and you may be successful.
Your video may get hundreds of thousands of views, but a genuinely viral video takes on a life of its own.
Remember Pikotaro’s PPAP?
Sure, Justin Bieber liked it, but I just checked, and that video has 131,906,705 views which means it has taken on a life of its own.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 6th-grade education (age 11).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 81.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.