Am I lying to myself about having no choice?

Jean-Paul Sartre

Almost certainly, and is the name for how it is done.

Sartre's famous example is a waiter whose movements are a little too precise, a little too much the movements of a waiter. He is not deceiving the customers. He is playing at being a thing — as though waiter were what he is rather than what he is doing — because being a thing is restful and choosing is not.

The workplace versions are familiar. I can't leave, I have a mortgage. This is just who I am now. I don't have a choice. Sartre's response is that you do, that you are exercising it continuously, and that describing the constraint as total is how you avoid noticing.

He is not denying that circumstances are real. is his own term for everything you did not choose — your history, your dependents, the market you are in. The claim is that facticity sets the terms of a choice without ever making it, and that between the terms and the decision there is you.

This is less comforting than it sounds. If you are choosing this job every morning, the misery is something you are consenting to. The standard objection — that flattens the difference between real constraint and inconvenience — is a fair one, and Gramsci makes it from the other side.

Where this goes