You don’t actually/literally have to
is a statement that can be kinda useful but still always annoys me.
If we go all the way, then there is nothing we literally have to do. We don’t even have to exist. We could just not.
But typically, we care about outcomes, have preferences of one state over other states. So, given we want to achieve state X or prefer outcome X over outcome Y, we have to do action J1.
Ofc, we could just say that we want to do action J as a consequence of wanting state/outcome X. And as a cognitive reframing, this can be helpful. But also, we might only be doing J so that we can get X, not bc we care about J itself or derive enjoyment from it, etc. So we might want it in an instrumental sense, but don’t desire to do it.
Stating “I have to write the report” conveys that we do it for the outcome, not for the process. Or perhaps that the outcome is so important that, even though we happen to enjoy the process, it is entirely irrelevant whether or not we like the process or not.
In this way, the phrase is useful as-is, and brings me to No Voids in Word Space, please.
Example of the benefit of this cognitive reframing:
Saying “I want to write this report bc [reason]” helps us think about the consequences of not writing it. Maybe we do only really care about the consequences and “I have to write this report” then becomes a good shorthand. But we also might find that the reason we had originally has become invalid. Or, maybe after having used the same ~bad reason we might realize it’s time for a change. Maybe the reason “so I don’t get shouted at by my boss and maybe get fired” sparks “let’s look for a new job” or “what’s a better way to do this”, etc.
Footnotes
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The ‘have to’ always assumes a preference, how smth ought to be, and with that what one ought to do, rather than just how it is, i.e. the “is/ought problem” / Hume’s guillotine. ↩