Bad faith check
Notice where you're telling yourself "I have no choice" when, in fact, you have one.
Some constraints are real: money, health, other people's power over you. This lesson isn't asking you to pretend otherwise, or to blame yourself. If someone is controlling or harming you, please reach out to someone you trust.
The story
In 1943, in occupied Paris, Jean-Paul Sartre published Being and Nothingness. Its most famous scene takes place in a café.
Sartre watches a waiter whose movements are just a little too precise: he bends a little too eagerly, balances his tray a little too perfectly. He is playing at being a waiter, as if "waiter" were what he simply is, like a table is a table. Sartre called this bad faith: pretending we are fixed things, so that we don't have to face the fact that we are free.
“Man is condemned to be free.”
The idea
"I have to." "I can't." "That's just how I am." Sometimes these are true. Often they hide a choice, because owning the choice feels heavier than having none.
A bad faith check asks, without blame: which part of this am I treating as fixed that is actually up to me, even a little? "I have to stay late every night" might become "I'm choosing to, because I'm afraid of what happens if I don't." That's harder to hear, and it's also where your freedom starts.
Seeing the choice doesn't mean you have to change it. Sometimes you'll choose the same thing, but as a choice, which feels different.
Echoes in other traditions
- Stoicism
Epictetus taught that even when our circumstances aren't up to us, our responses are.
- CBT
"Should" and "must" statements are a classic pattern of thinking that CBT invites you to question.
Try it with something on your mind
Think of something you feel you "have to" do, or "can't" do.
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Check your understanding
A friend says, "I can't quit, I'd have no money." What would a bad faith check look like?
Finish the lesson
Answer the question above to complete the lesson.