Dessert After the Salad

Lina was the person her company’s whole accounts department relied on. And in the week she closed the month’s accounts a day early, she postponed Saturday’s hour with her father for the third time.

On Monday, she found a discrepancy between two figures worth no more than a cup of coffee. No one else noticed it. She refused to leave it until morning and stayed at the company until eleven at night. On Tuesday, a colleague in the department was absent. Lina carried the absent colleague’s files to her own desk. On Thursday, her manager told the whole department, “Without Lina, we wouldn’t have closed the books this month.” Before switching off her computer, she added up the time she had given the company beyond her working hours: fourteen hours.

On Thursday evening, she opened her phone’s calendar. On Saturday, an hour was marked “Dad.” She had already moved it twice and no longer remembered why she had moved it the second time. She pressed her finger on it and dragged it to the following Saturday. “I’ve worked so hard this week,” she told herself. “I deserve a Saturday for me.” She still had not written anything to her father.

The same accounting goes on at your own table.

You decide not to eat dessert today. You order a large salad, with no bread. You feel a little pleased with yourself. Then someone asks whether you would like a bit of dessert. You agree without a second thought. You feel no guilt. You feel you deserve it, as though the salad bought you a permit to eat whatever you like afterward.

After doing something good, we feel we have earned credit to spend on a later failing. We turn the good deed into an excuse, as though it pays off the later failing. Psychologists call this mechanism “moral licensing”¹.

How does this happen without any sense of contradiction?

In Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind, Robert Kurzban describes the mind as a set of subsystems that do not continually review one another’s work²—like a board whose members never meet.

The Credit We Imagine

In one study, participants rejected openly discriminatory statements, then read a scenario about a job usually associated with men. The men who had first established their “innocence” were more likely to favor a man for the job than their counterparts. This difference did not appear among women³.

A later analysis brought together dozens of studies and found a small, variable effect⁴. A good deed may become an excuse for some of us in some circumstances.

Rest says, “I’ve done my work. Now I’ll rest.” Licensing says, “I’ve done my work there, so I deserve to fall short here.” The problem begins when your achievement becomes permission to break a promise or neglect what someone is owed.

Keeping your word cannot be split between two accounts. The command to fulfill commitments says: ﴿يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُوٓاْ أَوْفُواْ بِٱلْعُقُودِ﴾ O you who have believed, fulfill [all] contracts. (Al-Ma’idah 5:1)⁵. Do not use a good deed as your answer for another promise you failed to keep.

“How Can I Pray When I Still Do Wrong?”

Do you remember the appointment we opened this book with? Fifteen minutes every day, at work or university, that you never miss. Now we name its counterpart: five appointments for prayer each day. For those fifteen minutes, there is a scheduled time, people waiting for you, and someone taking attendance. At prayer time, no manager waits to record your absence. This is a difference in how attendance is monitored, not an explanation for every absence. Even a clear appointment can be disrupted by what happens within you.

Lina used her good work to give herself permission to let her father down. Some people do the reverse: they give up doing something good that they want to do because they have not yet put another wrong right. They say, “How can I pray when I’m still doing such-and-such?”

If perfection were a condition for beginning, no one would ever begin anything. You can keep your appointment for prayer and put right what you have done wrong. Keeping the prayer appointment does not cancel the need to put things right. Nor does that unfinished work have to keep you from prayer. You are reviewing two accounts, rather than issuing a verdict on yourself.

The Quran says: ﴿إِنَّ الْحَسَنَاتِ يُذْهِبْنَ السَّيِّئَاتِ﴾ Indeed, good deeds do away with misdeeds. (Hud 11:114)⁶. This verse accompanies the command to establish prayer. Goodness is a step you take, rather than a prize you wait for until you become perfect.

A third door remains, and the tools in this book cannot open it. Some people have stopped praying because they are no longer sure, rather than because no one checks on them or because they fear hypocrisy. This is a real reason, not one of the lawyer’s excuses, and it should not be treated as an excuse. This book’s tools answer the question “Why do I put off what I believe in?” The person at this door asks an earlier question: Do I believe in it at all? That question deserves honest reading of another kind, and a conversation with someone who can hear it without alarm or haste. All this chapter can do is keep that person distinct from the one making excuses: the first needs an answer, the second a mirror.

One Standard for Work and Home

On Saturday, Lina slept until ten. At three, she opened the chat with her father and wrote, “Dad, month-end closing week wore me out. Next Saturday, God willing.” Before she pressed “Send,” she saw two older messages of hers above it. Both ended with the same sentence.

She did not press it. She opened a new page in her notes and put her week on a single list: fourteen hours beyond her working hours. The absent colleague’s files. A month closed a day early. And on the last line: Dad’s hour, postponed for the third time. If a colleague brought her a spreadsheet in which a surplus under one item covered a deficit under another, she would send it back within a minute. That was what she had done with her own week. Then she asked herself: did she still need rest? She had slept until ten. Nothing remained of the week’s exhaustion but talk about it.

She went back to the chat, deleted what she had written, and typed, “I’ll come at four.” A minute later, her father replied, “I’ve put the water on.”

Her father brought the backgammon board out from under the sofa. They had not played since her first year at university. She told him about closing the month’s accounts, but not about the design course. Her phone was in the car, as it had been during that first hour-long Saturday visit. When she asked for the rest of the story about his first job, he rolled the dice. “We’ll need more than an hour one Saturday for that.” She lost the first game. Her father laughed. “An accountant who can’t count?”

By the time her father put the backgammon board back under the sofa, the full hour had passed. The score was two games to one in his favor. At the door, he said, “Next Saturday, at four.” In the car, she found a message from her colleague in the department asking about a file. She wrote, “Tomorrow morning.” Then she opened the list, deleted “postponed” from the last line, and replaced it with “A full hour. Lost two games.”

The Promise Still Owed

Tonight, write down one promise you still owe. Beside it, write the good deed you use to justify putting it off. Separate the two. Set a first action and a time for it within a week. When the time comes, record what you did, rather than what you felt you deserved.

At the dorm, Karim was talking loudly to his team in the game. From his bed, his roommate began, “Could you lower…” Karim said, “Of course,” before he could finish. His roommate laughed. “I’m not your father.” Karim lowered his voice. He did not laugh.