Bargains we make with ourselves to justify our choices
It starts with me picking up a
book at the store just because I knew the writer’s name through a recent movie
that I had seen. What was so special about her book that they turned it into a
movie? Why her? Why that particular story? Well, the answer to my questions
were right there in front of my eyes, in a neatly stacked bookshelf. A book
from that writer. The only copy of the book that I could see in that section.
The last copy. That’s the problem of being ever-curious, impulse buying is
always justifiable.
It wasn’t until 1 year later that
I picked up the book to read, when I found out the truth. I had picked up the
third installment of the series, of which I had seen the first installment as a
movie. Here’s the thing about Bibliophiles (at least me) – I can’t read a book
at random from a series. It has to be chronologically set. I have to read the
books in the same order of how it was published. And since I had already
finished the better half of my annual salary buying other books, I grieved for
another 6 months before I finally found the courage to do something adventurous
vis-à-vis read the third installment, without having read the first two.
Knowing the story of the first
installment through the movie gave me a background about female protagonist.
But it seemed like a lot has happened during the second book, which was irritating
and interesting at the same time. It did slow down my reading for the first 15
days of starting the book, as I kept mentally cribbing about the fact that I should
never impulse buy a book ever again or the google searches I did for the PDF
version of the second book online (guilty as charged). Then, suddenly, one day
when the author had created a mystery around the female protagonist’s employer,
it got interesting in a way that I gulped down 30 pages (front and back) in a
matter of 7 minutes. And the time came when I stopped, reading the same
sentence over and over again.
‘Bargains we make with ourselves to justify our choices’
Bargains we make with ourselves
to justify our choices. Bargains we make with ourselves to justify our choices.
No matter how many times I read
it, it has the same effect as it had the first time. It hit me right there on
the left side of my chest, sending ripples all the way down to the pit of my
stomach. My stomach churned and suddenly the brain started to work with extra
effort, trying to recall every moment that I made a bargain with myself to
justify my choices and to make myself feel better.
At first, no memories came up.
Then, I was in denial – justifying the bargains that justified my choices. And
at last, when my brain kept popping up memories one after another, a tiny
sprout of self-doubt started to grow until I had all the examples when that
sentence was proven correct. At last leaving me to wonder, why do we need to
justify our choices?
Picture this – there you are,
perfectly content in your own world surrounded by friends and having a
perfectly good amount of self-esteem, trying to lose weight by dieting. One day,
a doughnut or a muffin or an innocent looking delicious treat takes you off
course. You enjoy it. But as the hours pass by, you question yourself, why did
you do that? Why would you back off on your commitment? But the truth is, you
experience discomfort not because you enjoyed the treat but because you lost
control – which clearly is not what is expected out of you. Hence, your quest
starts – to justify your action. In the end, you either change your belief (dieting is just a trend/myth) or you
justify it by promising to compensate by skipping lunch or you pacify yourself
by becoming your own Santa (I have been
good all along – this little treat is just a reward).
So, why do we justify our
choices? Can’t we just say that ‘I made that
choice because I wanted to’? Why do we always have to explain? ‘I made that choice because I thought it was
the best’ OR ‘I chose that because it
made sense at the time’. Well, there are many, many crazy theories giving
us reasons why we justify our choices. It can be either to maintain a positive
self-image, or to be always on the right side of the question or even to reduce
dissonance. These topics are clearly too distinguished and complicated to talk
about here. But here is what I believe.
We, as individuals, are the only
ones who knows the complete truth about ourselves. About what we do, about what
we think, about what we would like to do. Nothing about us, is hidden from
ourselves – including all the conscious, sub-conscious and unconscious part of
us. We all know how good we are and when the time demands, how bad we can get.
And that is what scares us. The common norm of the society tells us that if you
be good, you get to have more social interaction. If you are bad, you will be
shunned. That is how our society is. No matter how much ever we preach about
second chances, we all know deep down that there are none.
So what do we do when a situation
arises? We act in a way that we want to, to avoid suffering from dissonance,
while we later realize that what we did doesn’t exactly fit the ‘norm’ of the
society. To curb this awful feeling of what will people think, what will
friends say and how will parents react, we link our untaken actions to
non-existent situations – justifying that – ‘if
I wouldn’t have done that, this would have happened’. We spend hours
perfecting our would-be-belief, adding one or more cognition as per taste.
Finally, we repeat the outcome like a mantra in our head to make it stick. But it is not until we say it out loud to
someone else that we start believing it. This is because once we say it, it is
out there in the world.
A story has now become a fact.
Isn’t this how it goes?
Food for thought – Would it be so bad to justify your actions just by saying that you did what you did because it made you happy?
Until Next Timeth,
GeekChic
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