Justifying

Hey Guys,

Something that has come about a fair amount lately in my life has been this idea of justifying your actions, your mistakes and everything along that sort. I was talking with a solid group of guys tonight and it came up how much we justify our actions. We also dilute the truth or the actual severity of our actions. It is in our human nature to try and rationalize our actions. We look at what has happened in our lives and the damage we have done and justify it through 'rational' arguments. For me I happened to make a mistake and then justify it by saying the actual actions and severity was not that bad. That what I had done was not as mad as it could have been. Rather then accepting my actions I justified them through rational ideas.

Why do we do this? I believe it is human nature to make things easier to deal with. Rather then to have to deal with the real problems we face is we dilute them and rationalize them they are easier to deal with. Facing problems in life is difficult and if we make excuses for them they are much much easier to deal with. I talked about this earlier about my stats class and how they were justifying cheating. It is the same sort of thing we will face in life, we usually make excuses. I am not saying blame yourself for everything but stay away from lying to yourself with saying things like, no one will find out, no one is getting hurt and that there will be no effect. Maybe this is just me but what I have seen in my life is the more we justify actions the more we will be willing to push the envelope later.

What I am trying to get at is this, try to stay away from justifying actions by diluting the severity. I do not want you now to go out and believe everything is wrong and then everything needs a super punishment. But do not try and push away your problems and mistakes by saying they are less then they are. It will effect you in the long wrong more then you can imagine. Within my own life it has allowed me to push boundaries and over look falling shorts because I was justifying my own life. So be careful!

Goodbye for now,

Christian Sawka