I am an excuse, I love my existence.
That one last compassionate peg at 2 a.m. lands you with red eyes in your 9 a.m. review. That BFF’s wedding which you witnessed on FaceTime because you missed giving enough face time to your better half. That flat tire cab en route gets you to knock on the meeting room door when everybody’s almost finishing the 3rd slide. That pseudo fever which is a mix of cold, temperature, headache, stomach ache, or an anal ache? which henceforth stands larger than life against your incompetency in completing your grad school assignment. That supreme situation of pressure, stress, frustration was the core reason you abided by nicotine and alcohol. That one leverage which your mother/father knows for sure as your classic escapism route from home-based deeds.
You know no matter how sorted (lately, a term that humans excessively refer to for perfect living situations) your life is, your cranium, that left brain is always inclined towards pushing an excuse out of your tongue the moment you fail to deliver a planned deed.
An excuse is one of those exclusive entities that proves humans are the smartest living being on this planet. No matter if you’re called dumb, intelligent, brainy, slag — you would never miss this beautiful piece of real-time creation. When I say real-time, it is beyond what humans can do in real-time. Don’t believe me? Stare at a known person who’s nearest to you. See what he/she wants out of you in the next minute/hour. And if this doesn’t fall in line with your line of thought, *drum rolls* there is an excuse ready with you, in your subconscious brain already, waiting to be delivered through your senses.
Now, what is wrong with giving an excuse? If you analyze in practicality, it’s a subtle way to decline an actionable deed that is against what you think. In every other sense, it comes across as a legit action. It progressively becomes a ‘wrong’ when you use it in excess or when you’re thoroughly expected to do something and instead you throw one.
There is no proven theory that can account for losses that come out of giving excuses. There is also no proven theory that estimates the amount of character you lose because you give excuses. If you excuse me with these fancy data estimates, all that an excuse does at any moment is that it scales down a human’s thinking to a whole new low.
When you give an excuse to your folks, your boss, your colleagues, your friends, your maid, your watchman, your laundry guy, your milkman, your Amazon delivery guy — you’re judged low, you’re perceived as someone who’s running away from what is expected out of you.
Is this wrong? Maybe yes, maybe no! Depends on that situation.
Is that right? Absolutely not, because it kills a conversation. It disrupts the existing vibe between two human souls. It initiates detrimental thinking about that excuse owner in your head.
But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be used. Of course, you can excuse yourself from a boring conversation, from letting you pass through a human clutter, to gain somebody’s attention as and when required. These are subtle forms of excuses that would be ideal, if in abundance.
The problem is with the ones which come in a long-form statement and which is thought through. That can spoil any given moment to even be framed as life-destructive. Go back to your history books and check the number of civilizations that went down, the wars that were fought, the human thinking that evolved due to these very excuses.
Honestly, you don’t have to do anything big as mentioned above. Just keep chilling, and hear out what somebody has to say, not just those words coming out of their mouth, but take a minute to think why that concerned person is saying so. If it very well falls out of your thinking bandwidth, only then can you deliver an excuse which is termed a ‘good excuse’.
Beyond just thinking of an excuse, try thinking about why somebody’s aligning you with an action, it might save you loads and loads of relationships and goodwill.
After all, I am an excuse and I do not wish to love my existence.
