Well, in life we often give excuses. Excuses for not coming to a party, reasons why we couldn’t do something, why we failed at something, and so on.
Sometimes excuses are for others. Maybe we don’t want to hurt them, make them feel bad, or make them feel guilty. “Hey, sorry I couldn’t come to the party. I had some urgent work.” Nothing really wrong with that.
But the excuses we make for ourselves are a little different. Those are probably the more alarming ones. Because sometimes, we don’t just make an excuse. We build an entire story around it.
Suppose I wasn’t feeling motivated and didn’t go to the gym. Maybe that’s completely fine. I was having a bad day. But then I start looking for reasons why it was fine. I search on the internet. I find some article saying it’s okay to skip the gym when you’re mentally exhausted. I find a reel talking about rest days. Maybe I find someone saying that forcing yourself to work out when you’re feeling low can be unhealthy. All of those things might be true.
But I wasn’t really looking for the truth, was I? I was looking for something that would make me feel better about what I had already decided.
And this happens in much bigger situations too.
Take a relationship. Suppose a long-distance relationship doesn’t work. You might find stories, reels, and posts about how long-distance relationships are difficult. How distance creates emotional disconnection. How people naturally drift apart. And slowly, you start believing: “It was the distance.”
But imagine the exact same relationship happened without the distance. Now maybe the story changes. “It’s normal to lose interest when you see someone every day.” Same outcome. Different explanation.
And this is what I find interesting. We don’t always make completely fake excuses. Sometimes we take something that is actually true and use it to explain everything.
There really are problems with long-distance relationships. People really do lose motivation. But there is a difference between finding a possible explanation and finding an explanation that protects us from taking responsibility.
I think that’s where it gets dangerous. Because once we decide what story we want to believe, we can find enough evidence to support almost anything. We find patterns. We find examples. We find people who went through the same thing. We find data. And suddenly, our excuse doesn’t feel like an excuse anymore. It feels like the truth.
Maybe that’s just human nature. I think we prefer being the victim in our own story rather than being the person who caused the problem. And sometimes, even when we know somewhere inside that we were wrong, we’d rather build a good enough story than admit it.
The problem is, when this keeps happening, we stop correcting ourselves. Why would we? We already have an explanation.
And now, with AI, it might become even easier. You can tell AI your entire version of what happened, and it can give you ten reasons why your reaction was understandable, why the other person was wrong, and why you shouldn’t feel guilty. And maybe all of those reasons sound perfectly logical.
But what if your gut feeling is still telling you that you were wrong? Maybe that’s the question worth asking.
Not “Can I find a reason for what I did?” But “Am I looking for the truth, or am I just looking for evidence that makes me feel better?”
Because I think that’s the real danger of excuses. Not that they are always false. It’s that sometimes they are true enough to help us avoid the truth.
Edit: I realized quite late that there is actually something called “motivated reasoning”. And I think the examples I gave above are more around “confirmation bias”, where we look for things which support what we already believe or want to believe. But motivated reasoning is broader than just confirmation bias. There are probably many other ways in which we convince ourself that the story we are telling is the right one.
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