Things you don’t owe anyone an explanation for, according to psychology

We live in a world that demands constant explanation. Every decision, every transition, every unconventional choice seems to require a justification, a rationale that satisfies the invisible jury of social expectations. But here’s what I’ve learned after four decades of seeking approval in all the wrong places: the most profound freedom comes from recognizing what you don’t need to explain to anyone.

The psychology behind our compulsion to explain ourselves runs deeper than most of us realize. From childhood, we’re conditioned to seek validation through explanation. We explain our grades to our parents, our career choices to our professors, our life decisions to anyone who will listen. This isn’t just social courtesy—it’s a deeply ingrained survival mechanism that once served us well but now holds us back from authentic living.

I spent years trapped in this cycle. As a management consultant, then a PhD student, and later as a startup founder, I constantly felt the need to justify my choices. The irony? The more I explained, the less certain I became about my own decisions. It wasn’t until I quit my PhD halfway through and moved to New York City that I began to understand the liberating truth: some of life’s most important decisions can’t be explained because they emerge from a place beyond logic.

The courage to be disliked—a concept I first encountered in Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga’s groundbreaking work—isn’t about being disagreeable. It’s about recognizing that your authentic path might not make sense to others, and that’s perfectly fine. When we stop explaining our choices, we stop diluting them. We stop reshaping our truth to fit someone else’s understanding.

As I explored in a recent video, this realization transformed everything about how I approach life:

Consider how we approach relationships. We feel compelled to explain why we’re still single, why we ended that relationship, why we’re not ready for commitment. But these explanations often serve as shields, protecting us from the vulnerability of simply being where we are. The truth is, your relationship status—whether you’re holding out for something meaningful or choosing solitude—requires no justification. The myth of the perfect partner, which I held onto for far too long, dissolves when you stop explaining what you’re looking for and start experiencing what actually is.

The same applies to career transitions. When I restructured my business and became a digital nomad in Southeast Asia, the conventional world demanded explanations. Why leave Los Angeles? Why abandon the traditional startup path? But the real question was different: Why did I feel obligated to make my choices comprehensible to people who weren’t living my life? The business thrived precisely because I stopped seeking permission through explanation and started making decisions from a place of inner clarity.

Psychology tells us that over-explaining often stems from what researchers call “rejection sensitive dysphoria”—an intense emotional response to real or perceived rejection. We preemptively explain to avoid the discomfort of being misunderstood. But here’s the counterintuitive truth: the more we explain, the more we invite judgment. Every explanation becomes an opening for debate, for someone to tell us why we’re wrong.

Your financial choices don’t require explanation either. Whether you choose minimalism or abundance, frugality or indulgence, these decisions emerge from your unique relationship with security, freedom, and value. I’ve watched people exhaust themselves explaining why they don’t own a home, why they invest in experiences over assets, why they support their family members financially. These explanations rarely satisfy the questioners because they’re asking from their own framework of values, not yours.

The depth of your friendships is another area where explanation becomes a trap. When I went through periods without friends, the worst advice I could have followed was to socialize more, to chase connections. Instead, those solitary periods taught me something crucial: it’s better to have a few close friendships than lots of shallow ones. You don’t owe anyone an explanation for your social choices, for preferring depth over breadth, for choosing Saturday night solitude over obligatory social gatherings.

There’s profound psychological research on what’s called “self-determination theory,” which suggests that human beings have three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. When we constantly explain ourselves, we undermine our autonomy. We signal that our choices require external validation to be legitimate. This creates a feedback loop where we become increasingly dependent on others’ approval, even for decisions that should be entirely our own.

Your lifestyle choices—how you spend your time, where you live, how you structure your days—these are perhaps the most over-explained aspects of modern life. The digital nomad lifestyle I’ve embraced raises eyebrows and questions. But explaining why I don’t want a traditional home, why I value mobility over stability, why I find happiness in uncertainty—these explanations never quite capture the lived experience of freedom I’ve found.

What’s particularly insidious about our explanation culture is how it shapes our self-perception. When we constantly justify our choices, we begin to doubt them. We start seeing our lives through the lens of how explicable they are rather than how authentic they feel. This is what I call the “explanation trap”—the more you explain, the more you need to explain, until your entire life becomes a performance of justification.

The challenges you’re working through don’t require explanation either. Whether you’re processing grief, navigating a career crisis, or simply feeling stuck, you don’t owe anyone a detailed account of your inner landscape. As I’ve learned through my own crises, including nearly losing my business, these challenging periods often contain seeds of transformation that can’t be articulated while you’re in them. The pressure to explain your struggles often prevents you from fully experiencing and learning from them.

Your boundaries require no explanation. This might be the most liberating realization of all. When you say no to a request, decline an invitation, or set a limit, the word itself is complete. The compulsion to soften boundaries with explanations often weakens them. “No, I can’t” is a full sentence. “That doesn’t work for me” requires no addendum.

Here’s what psychology tells us about the cost of over-explaining: it activates our stress response systems. Every explanation is a mini-performance where we’re simultaneously trying to be understood, accepted, and validated. This cognitive load accumulates, leaving us exhausted and disconnected from our authentic desires.

Your pace of life—whether you’re driven and ambitious or intentionally slow and contemplative—needs no justification. The myth that we must all optimize, hustle, and maximize every moment is just that—a myth. Some of us find meaning in intensity, others in gentleness. Neither approach requires explanation.

The spiritual or philosophical framework you use to navigate life is deeply personal. Whether you find meaning through traditional religion, secular philosophy, or your own synthesized worldview, these beliefs shape your reality in ways that often transcend explanation. The attempt to justify your spiritual choices often diminishes their personal significance.

Taking responsibility for everything in your life—a principle I’ve found transformative—doesn’t mean explaining everything to everyone. In fact, true responsibility often means owning your choices so completely that you no longer feel compelled to justify them. When you blame others, you give away power. When you explain excessively, you do the same thing, just more subtly.

The paradox of happiness reveals itself here too. You can’t chase happiness by explaining your way to it. Happiness emerges as a byproduct of living authentically, which often means making choices that don’t make sense to others. The moments of deepest joy in my life—building a sustainable business during crisis, finding genuine connections after periods of solitude, discovering freedom through uncertainty—none of these could have been explained in advance.

What would your life look like if you stopped explaining? If you made decisions from a place of inner knowing rather than external validation? If you trusted that the right people would understand without explanation, and the wrong people wouldn’t understand no matter how much you explained?

This isn’t about becoming cryptic or dismissive. It’s about recognizing that your life is not a thesis requiring defense. Your choices, your path, your timing—these emerge from a complex interplay of experience, intuition, and desire that often can’t be reduced to logical explanation.

The ultimate psychological truth is this: the less you explain, the more energy you have for actual living. Every moment spent justifying your choices is a moment not spent embodying them. Every word of explanation is energy diverted from creation, from connection, from the actual experience of being alive.

So perhaps the question isn’t what you don’t owe anyone an explanation for—it’s what you do. And the answer might be much shorter than you think. Because at the end of the day, a life well-lived speaks for itself, no explanation required.