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Comment by carlosjobim | Hacker News Reader

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carlosjobim

The most important are those who live in our heads and can take over our souls:

"If only I was rich"

"If only I was born rich"

"If only I was better looking"

"If only I had the energy"

"If only I was smart"

"If only I had the time"

All of the above are usually excuses we make to not do the things we wish to.

It took me embarrassingly long in my youth to understand that when people said "I don't have time" or "I can't afford to", what they really meant was "I don't want to".

But when we're telling this to ourselves it is also lies almost 100% of the time.

Then it's better to either put those thoughts aside and start making things happen. Or admit to yourself when you don't want to.

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Describing these as 'excuses' seems to reduce a yet broader, overarching idea to its essential fault somewhat cleanly: looking at the listed cases in the article, they generally seem to be serving as excuses to others for not engaging by replacing a counter-argument with fundamental invalidation—an excuse to the standards of the self, and a corruption risk to the standards of the other. This mechanism seems a little like a run-time exception for responding to preserve internal coherence in response to an unmanaged (perception of) expectation. Ideally, an honest and coherent refusal of the engagement would be possible and provided—"Sorry, I don't have the capacity for this discussion right now"—but such circumstances often align with mental resources (and thus capacity to provide such 'cooperative refusals') being limited, and so the response may drop to a 'lower order', where the basis of the disagreement is invalidated (excused) instead. Then, there's the more negative case of low-effort rejection of engagements which don't seem worthwhile ("I've had this argument a hundred times, and it never goes anywhere"). Here, the general heuristic of 'effort optimisation' seems to lead to narrow-mindedness and (in turn or in parallel) dismissal of others' perspectives and the understanding of others in turn, such that they warrant neither coherent engagement nor coherent reason for refusal; thus, the basis of the discussion is again discarded, regardless of its general validity. In my experience, this can cause severe misunderstandings when the 'prejudice' underlying that dismissal isn't recognised; I've found it to 'mess me up' more than a few times with an over-literal reading.

>> It took me embarrassingly long in my youth to understand that when people said "I don't have time" or "I can't afford to", what they really meant was "I don't want to".

And "I don't want to" often means "I don't want to make the effort, but I would like the outcome if I did."

I think it really means "I would like to, but the cost is too high." IE - They like the idea of the reward, but the "expense" in terms of opportunity cost is too high.

They just don't think it through to the end when they say it. Or maybe they do, and this is just an easier way to say it?

What youre describing is important enough that it surely also has a name, but its not what thought-terminating cliches are.

Those fall into the category of defeatism, perhaps?

Yes. "Learned helplessness" also crossed my mind.

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