Actionless Excuses
Imaginative ways to avoid responsibilities
There’s an idea that I see often and that I find sad. I’ve been struggling to name the concept, but I’ve now decided to call it Actionless Excuses.
It’s easier to explain the concept of actionless excuses with an example. Imagine you are someone who has the habit of going to the gym every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 5 pm. Today is Wednesday (for the sake of the example), pull day, and your back hurts. It’s 4:30 pm, and you’re deciding whether to go to the gym or not.
After discussing it with yourself, you decide not to go. In most cases, this is an intelligent decision; it’s not worth it to push yourself and make that injury worse.
However, what is not right is what you do with that time that you were supposed to use for your workout. You decide to spend that hour doing something pointless, such as watching a stupid TV show or playing a video game. Note: these are not pointless per se, but let’s say they are in this case.
That’s the easy path. Your back pain turns into an excuse to be lazy. An actionless excuse. Why?
Instead of watching TV, you could have used that time to take an action that would help you recover from your back injury. You could have stretched, or you could have visited a physio.
You could have even trained some of your healthy muscles, although if your back really hurts, I understand this could be uncomfortable or dangerous as well.
Anyway, going back to the previous paragraph, the point is that it’s much easier to do nothing than to do something that would eventually make your excuse worthless. We justify these actions with thoughts like: “I need to rest” or “It’s just one day,” which are not applicable.
These thoughts are sometimes embedded in our minds; they are a sort of automatic response to an action. This can make it hard for us to identify in the first place. However, once we do, we need to take action. Build the habit of switching that problem-focused mindset into a solution-based one. Avoid actionless excuses and focus on what you can do to solve the problem that is triggering that justification in the first place.
So, the next time you find yourself making up excuses NOT to do something, try to find what you CAN do to solve the root problem. Reflect on your justification and decide if it’s valid or if it’s a way to dodge a duty.
I hope this post made you think a little bit. I’d love to hear your opinions and insights, whether they are positive or negative! Please leave a comment or message me on X, Instagram, or Facebook, and we can chat! Thanks for reading!
See you later!
You clarify that watching a tv show is not per se stupid, but I would like to add that not only it is not stupid, but we need these moments of idling. We often try to be "productive" every single second of our day, and we forget the importance of relaxing. That can mean going for a walk, or just lying the couch, but the important part is to give our brain a moment to rest.