I promise you, I equally hate having to say sorry all the time.
It doesn’t matter though, because I will fuck up in an unacceptable way with someone I love or who has power over me, and I will have to manage that moment some how.
In that moment if I cannot guarantee I will not repeat a similar kind of action that created the problem again, I am left with no agency except to attempt to express the fact that it emotionally impacted me that I hurt that person with my fuck up.
I really don’t think people are understanding my point here. It is so easy to say “Nobody wants to hear apologies” because it is so self evidently true, but that is precisely what makes apologies one of the most practical forms of poetry. You have to impact someone with your words when the last thing they want in the world are words.
People can handwave away everything I am saying as overthinking it or trying to manipulate people but frankly when you consider people’s actual lived experiences it is absurd to claim this isn’t a problem we all have to solve almost every day of our lives even if the stakes aren’t usually existential. If we were biologists studying any other animal we would quickly conclude that making genuinely impactful apologies that stay don’t overstay their welcome is one of the most important skills of social interaction in our species.
It just feels good to say the words “Nobody wants to hear an apology” because yes, every single one of us can immediately conjure the feeling of aggressively wanting action not words. That is why most of the time apologies don’t work, that doesn’t mean they aren’t frequently our only option (that we take with a rational understanding of it being a low probability of success strategy). The cultural blindspot people have about this when discussing human interactions in the abstract is exhausting.