It was past 11 PM, raining hard. I was on my way back from work after already spending three hours driving.
In another ten minutes, I should have been home. Instead, my car broke down in the middle of the road where trucks thundered past like they owned the night.
The driver didn’t waste a second before declaring, with nervous certainty, “The engine’s down because of the rain.”
I don’t know cars beyond the kind a kid drives with a remote. But something in his tone carried a tremor—a flicker of guilt that didn’t quite match the excuse.
“Still, let’s try refueling,” I suggested.
He walked off to the nearest fuel station while I stayed back, waving down trucks in the downpour. Eventually, he lugged back fuel and—just like that—the car roared back to life. The culprit wasn’t the rain. It was an empty tank. My driver had simply missed the indicator.
As we drove home, I realized he had forgotten to refuel and overlooked the warning light. But in that moment, blame felt easier than owning the oversight.
I was tempted to point out that I had figured it out, but something within laughed at me instead. My mind began to tangle with memories of all the times I had escaped by shifting the blame.
So no, I can’t look down upon him from a high tower. I have been in this very battlefield myself—constantly keeping my guard up, holding a weapon close, staring at the world like it’s my enemy. Like him, I too have been at war with the world.
That’s when the thought struck me: when you win the blame game, is it really a victory?
“It’s not stress that kills us, it is our reaction to it.”
~ Hans Selye, “The Stress of Life” (1956)
Blame gives us an immediate escape from uncomfortable, tricky situations. But is there ever a permanent fix to this constant need for escapism? And what if constantly lying to ourselves isn’t just morally questionable but also psychologically expensive?
The answer, I think, requires tracing back to where we first learned that fallibility was dangerous.
“The child who despairs of his worth, of his tools, or of his status among his tool partners, may develop a lasting sense of inadequacy.”
~ Erik Erikson, “Childhood and Society” (1950)
Somewhere in our early years, the seed was planted. When families punished mistakes harshly, when schools treated errors as character flaws, when institutions equated competence with infallibility. The conditioning doesn’t stop there—we carry that baton forward and impose the same expectations on peers and colleagues.
When mistakes in childhood are met with ridicule or punishment, the subconscious learns to hide flaws as protection against inadequacy. These experiences teach us that our worth is conditional on performance. Mistakes are no longer learning opportunities. Rather, they become inconvenient threats to our very acceptability.
This grows into what we might call “the perfection imperative”—the belief that any admission of error risks catastrophic judgment or abandonment.
Consequently, each of us constructs an image of the Ideal Self we must live up to, even if it means chiseling away at who we are to fit the mold.
“The neurotic process is a special form of human development; it is a development away from the real self and toward an idealized self.”
~ Karen Horney, “Neurosis and Human Growth” (1950)
The unfortunate consequence is that we become trapped in our own self-image. We polish it into a societal persona, and soon we are juggling denial and excuses.
In moments of potential blame, the threat to ego feels overwhelming, triggering automatic defensive responses. Blame-shifting protects against the core fear of being exposed as inadequate. Our patterns of blame are learned responses: we protect self-image by externalizing failure and discarding evidence that contradicts our beliefs because it creates uncomfortable self-awareness.
In both self-image and societal persona, the underlying assumption remains the same: failing or erring is unacceptable, somehow incompatible with being a worthwhile person.
The irony is clear. For ourselves, we pretend to be victims of external forces. Yet when analyzing others, we assume personal intention and individual responsibility. This asymmetry isn’t accidental—it serves the perfection imperative perfectly. It’s a cognitive trick that allows us to remain blameless while still blaming others.
“There is a tendency to attribute success to internal factors and failure to external factors when the outcome concerns the self.”
~ Fritz Heider, “The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations” (1958)
The question arises—why bother interrogating this? To most, it doesn’t seem serious, perhaps forgotten in a blink. But what if there are real consequences to this everyday habit?
What if there’s an energy cost to blame?
Modern neuroscience shows that self-deception drains biological resources. The brain’s effort to maintain contradictory beliefs activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, the body’s primary stress response system. When we insist on narratives rejected by the subconscious, the HPA axis treats the contradiction as a threat, releasing cortisol and other stress hormones.
Chronic activation of this system produces measurable effects: disrupted sleep, compromised immunity, elevated inflammation. Researchers call this “chronic cognitive load.” It literally depletes glucose in the brain, disrupts the natural cortisol awakening response, and interferes with memory consolidation during sleep.
Even when people report no distress from maintaining false narratives, their biology tells a different story. Cortisol stays elevated, sleep quality declines, immune function suffers. The body keeps the ledger, even when the conscious mind has stopped paying attention.
The hippocampus, crucial for memory, is especially vulnerable. Chronic cortisol impairs its ability to consolidate experiences. The result: the more we blame others, the less accurately we remember events. It becomes easier to sustain false narratives, harder to learn from experience.
Sustained stress also triggers pro-inflammatory cytokines. Psychological defense literally becomes physical inflammation, contributing to everything from cardiovascular disease to accelerated aging.
The anterior cingulate cortex—the brain’s conflict-monitoring center—remains hyperactive in those clinging to contradictory beliefs. This vigilance drains glucose that could fuel creativity, problem-solving, and genuine connection.
The body treats our psychological contradictions as physical threats, mobilizing resources against dangers that exist only in our stories.
“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”
~ Jean-Paul Sartre, “Being and Nothingness” (1943)
The energy cost is steep. The brain consumes 20% of our glucose despite being only 2% of body weight. Defensive narratives divert resources from higher-order functions—creativity, empathy, learning—to the upkeep of fragile self-images.
The phenomenologists offer another perspective.
Edmund Husserl observed that consciousness is always “intentional”—directed toward something. When we’re not caught in blame patterns, consciousness flows freely, open to experience.
But blame creates an “intentional trap.” Our awareness is consumed with maintaining defensive stories. Instead of being present, we manage how events fit our narrative of innocence.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty added the insight of “embodied cognition.” We don’t just think our defensive stories—we feel them. Blame shows up in tense shoulders, shallow breathing, restless sleep.
This explains why chronic blamers often seem tired, reactive, or on edge. Their nervous systems are literally carrying the weight of stories that demand constant defense.
The burden of blame isn’t moral—it’s energetic. Every minute spent maintaining innocence is a minute stolen from growth, creativity, and connection.
So the real question isn’t whether we’re good or bad for blaming others. It’s whether we want to spend our resources on curating excuses or on becoming who we’re capable of being.
And yes, it’s understandable why we do this. Even if we owned our mistakes, would the world treat us fairly? Probably not. But to care about others’ judgment is itself a product of the same conditioning that compels us to build self-image in the first place. Once free from that conditioning, the consequences of honesty matter less. At that point, it isn’t about strategy to win—it’s about courage to fight.
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”
~ Viktor Frankl, “Man’s Search for Meaning” (1946)
When I look around, I see people carrying invisible backpacks, shoulders bent under the weight of stories they’re afraid to revise. The tragedy isn’t that they’re wrong about who’s to blame. The tragedy is what they’re not creating while their energy goes into curation instead of creation.