Excuses, Excuses

In my field there is a science to asking questions. For instance, a technique called Motivational Interviewing is a method questioning that helps build a sense of control and autonomy in the client when discussing problems. Over the years I have learned to adjust my language to make questions easier to answer, highlight a person's autonomy, and train active decision making.

I often use the question tag, "How did you choose to..." For instance, "How did you choose to stay in bed once the alarm went off?" Common responses are:

• I just did.

• I didn't choose to stay in bed.

• I didn't want to get up.

• What's the point?

This question generates a number of predictable potential responses. It just so happens that any response to that question other than, "I never thought of it that way," is an excuse (i.e., the foundation of an argument) in favor of the bad decision to stay in bed. The excuse or argument, however, is almost never meant for me, the asker. I have found that people generate excuses mainly to justify their own bad decisions to themselves. We tend to be our own harshest critic, so we come up with very sophisitcated and intricate excuses, and we tend to generate a lot of them. I have found that excuses can fall into several categories.

The Royal We

This excuse is one of the easier ones to identify. People tend to use the pronoun "we" when the listener could expect "I." Sometimes it's clear who "we" is, and sometimes it's not. I will often ask who "we" is because it's helpful for me to see how people are framing the issue. The purpose, as far as I can tell, to use "we" instead of "I" is to distribute responsibility. If "we" made a decision then I'm not the only one open to scrutiny. Often people are willing to give up their autonomy if it means less responsibility.

Low Priority/High Priority

Prioritizing is mainly an executive functioning task, but there's a whole language around describing the cognitive process of prioritization. To that end, a person can sound like they are making a tough choice about doing this instead of that, but really they're describing doing nothing at all. For instance, a person once told me they decided to prioritize exercise over homework last night because exercise helps them focus. When asked, however, they confirm they didn't exercise. Or, they went for a walk and then played video games instead of doing homework. I think there is legitimate satisfaction out of choosing a better thing (exercise) over a good thing (homework). However, in many cases it turns out that the intent was likely never to do the homework. The act of prioritizing seemed or even doing something productive was satisfying enough. Meanwhile, the thing to do never got done.

Future Me's Problem

Some people get into a loop of assigning hard things to their future self. They intend to do something, and feel content in their good intention. They might even say they want to get it done, and feel good about that. They have faith that their future self will feel motivated to get the thing done. But nothing ever happens. And then, the future self is burdened with the cost of inaction. In the moment of distress I wish "past me" had just done the work. Past me is a terrible person, but future me will definitely do better.

The Moral Argument

Some people get very skilled at making inaction the right thing to do, and the outcome of other people's shortcomings. They can use the supposed failures of others, miscommunication, inefficiencies, or even ignorance (someone should have told me) to justify not getting things done. But, to avoid any sort of remediation they can reframe their inaction as just or right. In that way, there's nothing to fix. We can just hope other people don't screw up in the future and force me into inaction yet again. The classic example is the person who believes, "...voting is a civic duty, and certainly would vote if either of the two major parties would present a candidate worth voting for. If they're not doing to do their job, how can I possibly do mine? In fact, it's wrong to vote for a candidate I don't believe in."

There are more, for sure, but I wanted to affirm that we are mainly the intended audience for our own excuses. We have to be able to make sense of the fact that we can identify the right thing to do and still not do it. We can say we want to do it, but also fail to generate the will to do it. So, we make excuses which form the basis of a rationale for inaction. The good news is that when such arguments are vocalized or otherwise formalized, they sound thin or foolish even to the speaker.