The unfortunate truth is that without meaningful change, apologies are just like excuses in that you’re trying to tell someone else that they shouldn’t feel a certain way about things you do or don’t. Which then just becomes another thing that can bug them.
I mean, I don’t see apologies this way. I see apologies as an attempt to display some amount of caring that is not immediately apparent in your past actions. People aren’t robots, they don’t just care about whether you technically fulfill your tasks like a machine or not and no further. People are emotional beings, with mental models of other emotional beings around them that they use to inform their judgements and actions. I know it is easy to be reductive or cynical, but people really just don’t care only about whether you get the job done or not. I would likely not be alive if this were the case, as countless times in my life people with power over me have decided to extend empathy to me because they decided that even though my actions were not acceptable, my intentions and genuine desire to be a good person was evident.
That doesn’t mean you should never apologize, but try to do it as a conscious action rather than blurting out a “sorry!” any time you don’t feel perfect.
Of course, but I think it is fair for me to point out how when I do blurt out “sorry” that there is a very rational reason for it. It is my way of impulsively testing for a mine ahead, and once you step on enough mines the words “oh you’re fine this field doesn’t have mines in it!” just start to lose all meaning.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying here, but this seems like you actually understand why people get tired of constant apologies and are a bit tired of them yourself.
What I am saying is that the tiredness people feel that manifests as annoyance at me apologizing all the time is actually the same tiredness I feel at constantly causing situations where I need to apologize and it really hurts when people simultaneously demand I make them stop feeling an emotion while simultaneously demanding I stop feeling an emotion (and taking rational steps to reduce the likelihood of events happening that create that emotion in me). In other words, when I annoy someone from saying sorry too much, no matter what they believe from their perspective, I know without a shadow of a doubt that this mild annoyance is a small cost to pay for occasionally heading off major conflicts and proactively defusing rising tensions I wouldn’t have perceived until they were much bigger problems. This doesn’t just go for my mental well being, I KNOW it applies to the mental well being of others around me because I have seen the consequences of not saying sorry proactively and while they are less common they can be catastrophic in a way that makes all those small annoyance costs trivial.
Ranting about it won’t change it.
The point of my post was I wanted to express this in a space where people might actually understand, not to rant about it as if that would change it, and honestly I am a bit frustrated that you would project that on to my posts. I think I have put a lot of care and time into purposefully not doing that.