Stricter in Love Than in Law
Phrases that would rupture a friendship pass, at scale, as policy language
We already know how to hear through an excuse.
In love, the rules are brutal but simple. Euphemisms don’t repair betrayal. Technicalities don’t mend a broken promise. An apology without logistics doesn’t rebuild trust.
That’s why it was just a mistake doesn’t land. That’s why we weren’t official yet feels like evasion. That’s why you made me do it ends the conversation, not the conflict.
At home, we hold the line.
But in public life, the same evasions stroll past in suits. Oil spills hide behind “we complied with requirements.” Layoffs arrive as “the algorithm decided.”
The very phrases that would rupture a friendship pass, at scale, as policy language.
We grill teenagers harder than Boeing. We expect more follow-through from a partner than from Exxon, a corporation whose choices shape the atmosphere.
Our willingness to stomach the hypocrisy is load-bearing. Power organizes itself through our willingness to do the translation work.
Excuse-as-System
Excuses don’t signal failure of power—they’re a technology of it.
Each converts an act into abstraction, a decision into delay. The bureaucracy doesn’t erase the event; it redistributes its consequences. When a statement says we complied, the labor of meaning-making moves to you. You fill in the missing noun. You perform the patience. You clerk the fog.
That fog has a workforce: citizens performing interpretive, emotional, and administrative labor to keep the fiction of accountability intact. We translate euphemism into injury, absorb frustration as civility, and complete the paperwork that lets power remain self-congratulatory. The true cost of evasion is our time.
The Black-Box Alibi
Artificial intelligence didn’t invent this dodge; it scales it.
The system decided is just mistakes were made, but automated and sold as inevitability.
Human thresholds, overrides, and trade-offs vanish into code. Opacity becomes a credential. “Frictionless” means accountability-free.
When an algorithm denies benefits or dispatches police to the wrong door, the system hasn’t failed—it has successfully relocated responsibility.
Someone will appeal, wait, or fill out another form. The excuse is now a service model.
Refusal is Maintenance
Refusing to humor these dissonances and euphemisms is often misread as hostility. It’s not. It’s liberatory to reroute repair to its origin.
The tools aren’t new; they’re the same ones we use in love:
For the record, what was the act?
What action, by whom, by what date?
Without a noun, there is no remedy. Without a steward and a timeline, there is no change.
These questions return the unpaid labor of clarity to those who produced the harm.
Translate institutional language into domestic life and the absurdity clarifies itself.
If your roommate burned down the kitchen and insisted it was “within compliance,” you’d throw them out. In public life, they get a subsidy.
Should You Keep Playing Along?
Hey, I’m glad you’re here. If you’ve stumbled across this note, you might have noticed some common themes popping up in the world lately—exhaustion, feeling out of sync, and how so much of our lives seem like performances, especially online.
Flip the Standard
We already know how to practice accountability. We do it in the rooms where love still demands honesty. The problem isn’t that we’ve forgotten how; it’s that we, for whatever reason, stop applying it where the stakes are highest.
The greater the reach—the power to shape lives, markets, air, and memory—the stricter our standard should be.
If those questions are fair to ask of someone who claims to love you, they've got to be fair for any person or entity who claims to serve or love you.
Refuse to clerk their fog.