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You Don’t Owe Everyone an Explanation.
We justify every choice to everyone. Most of it we never owed.
Notice how often you feel you have to explain yourself.
You make a decision — about your life, your time, your choices — and immediately you feel the need to justify it. To explain your reasoning, defend your decision, make a case for why it’s okay. Someone questions a choice you’ve made, and you feel obligated to answer, to defend, to prove that your decision was justified. You live, much of the time, as though you owe everyone an explanation for the choices you make — as though your decisions require the approval or at least the understanding of others to be legitimate.
And I want to offer a permission that’s genuinely freeing: you don’t owe everyone an explanation.
Your choices are, in large part, yours to make. And while there are people and situations where you do owe honesty, consideration, or genuine explanation, you do not owe every person a justification for every choice you make. You’re allowed to make decisions without preparing a defense, without justifying them to everyone who asks, without treating your own choices as requiring external approval to be legitimate. Many of the choices you agonize over explaining, you never actually owed an explanation for at all.
