Excuses and priority (IM#155)

Human beings rarely admit that they are abandoning what matters to them. Instead, we reinterpret avoidance as circumstance, delay as strategy, and fear as practicality. Excuses protect the ego from a difficult truth: our actions often reveal priorities different from the ones we claim to have.

Existentialist thinkers argued that people escape responsibility by hiding behind external explanations. Jean-Paul Sartre described this as bad faith; pretending we are less free and less accountable than we really are. In that sense, an excuse becomes a quiet refusal to acknowledge agency.

Comfort strengthens this tendency. We naturally move toward familiarity and away from effort, uncertainty, or failure. Nietzsche warned that people often choose comfort over truth, even while claiming to pursue something greater.

That is why priorities matter. Clear priorities expose false excuses because they force us to compare what we say we value with what we consistently protect through our actions. A person’s priorities are ultimately revealed less by intention than by repeated choice.