Here lately, I've been checking out Y-Combinator's hacker news page almost daily to try to keep up with the latest development news and projects people show and tell on the site. There have been quite a lot of cool projects out there, ones that I've pinned to my favorites bar even.

There's a common theme I'm picking up on with nearly every github page or website I visit from the list. Whether its on the README file or nestled in a flashy little section on a website, there is a heading "Why {this project}?" where the developer gives a spiel about justifying their project.

Reminds me of myself if I'm being honest.

I feel like I've spent a lot of years justifying why I do, well, anything really. It makes me wonder if it's a generational thing, or something else. So, I did some research with Claude Opus 4.6 and here's the result:

The compulsion to explain yourself before doing anything

Every creative act on the modern internet seems to begin with an apology. A developer ships a side project and opens the README with "I know there are already a hundred of these, but…" A designer posts their work with a paragraph explaining the market gap it fills. Before the thing is even seen, the creator has already mounted a defense. This isn't a quirk of individual insecurity — it's a deeply rooted psychological impulse, amplified by cultural forces that have turned self-justification into a background process running in nearly everyone's head.

Your brain is running a courtroom you didn't build

Several psychological mechanisms converge on the same function: protecting the self. Leon Festinger's cognitive dissonance theory (1957) established that humans crave internal consistency between beliefs and actions, and when they detect a gap, they experience genuine discomfort. The brain resolves this by constructing justifications — sometimes in seconds, without conscious effort. You don't decide to justify. Your brain does it for you.

Erving Goffman's impression management framework (1959) adds the social layer: in his model, the self isn't something you have — it's something you perform. When someone justifies their project before sharing it, they're stage-directing the audience's interpretation before the curtain rises. And sociologists Hewitt and Stokes identified what they called disclaimers — phrases like "I'm not sure about this, but…" deployed in advance to neutralize anticipated criticism. The irony is that research suggests disclaimers often backfire. The shield becomes the wound.

Philip Tetlock's accountability theory argues humans are essentially intuitive politicians — constantly preparing defenses in anticipation of evaluation. The justification isn't something you bolt on afterward; it infiltrates the creative process itself. Layer on imposter syndrome — originally identified in 1978, now understood to be nearly universal across a systematic review of 62 studies — and every new project becomes another opportunity to be "found out," demanding a preemptive explanation.

What ties it all together is self-determination theory's concept of introjected regulation: you genuinely love your creative work (intrinsic motivation), but you also feel your value as a person depends on others approving of it. These run simultaneously, which is why even people who insist they're "just building for fun" still feel a pull to explain why the fun thing matters.

Social media turned everyone into a public company

The psychological impulse to justify is ancient. What's new is the infrastructure that amplifies it.

Eugene Wei offered perhaps the sharpest metaphor: posting on social media is like taking yourself public. Public companies are punished for stumbling and expected to produce quarterly narratives justifying their direction. The same dynamics now apply to individuals. The generational dimension is real but structural, not dispositional — millennials and Gen Z aren't psychologically weaker, they're just the first generations whose identity formation happened on platforms designed around public performance. A Boomer's career decisions happened mostly in private; a millennial's get announced on LinkedIn, interpreted on Twitter, and screenshotted in group chats.

LinkedIn is the justification industrial complex's headquarters. Every career move requires a narrative. Student newspapers have started publishing critiques — one noting that the platform encourages profession to be about performance rather than networking. The discomfort is widespread, but so is the compliance. People know the justification is performative, yet feel structurally compelled to participate.

Simon Sinek's Start With Why — his TED talk has over 56 million views — crystallized the expectation and turned it into gospel. What began as a business framework leaked into personal life until every side project needed a mission statement. This converged with hustle culture's peak in the 2010s, when every hobby was expected to be a hustle. Haley Nahman diagnosed it in a widely shared essay: she was encouraged to view any interest or talent as a possible career, reinforcing the idea that attention belongs more rightfully on profit than on pleasure. A 2017 Journal of Consumer Research study confirmed the structural incentive: busyness and lack of leisure time have become status symbols in the United States. Leisure requires justification.

Notably, the same study found the pattern reversed in Italy — Italians granted more status to people enjoying leisure. The Dutch have niksen, the Danes have hygge. The justification imperative is cultural, not inevitable.

Every README is a tiny existential crisis

Developer culture is where the justification impulse becomes most visible because it's been literally codified into templates. README guides include "Motivation" as a required section. The "yet another X" naming convention traces back to Bell Labs in the 1970s — Stephen C. Johnson named his tool YACC (Yet Another Compiler-Compiler) as self-deprecating acknowledgment that similar tools already existed. Fifty years later, the same anxiety drives developers to name projects with preemptive apologies.

Eric S. Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" gave developers their canonical justification framework: every good software starts by scratching a personal itch. Meant as description, it calcified into prescription. The Geek Feminism blog captured the dark side: "Somewhere along the way I got the impression that people usually get into open source via 'scratching their own itch.' Sometimes I thought I was inferior."

The tension between building for joy and building for utility is a live wire. Austin Henley's blog post "Why I Prefer Making Useless Stuff" hit 772 points on Hacker News, and the comment thread became a confessional. One developer described presenting a hobby OS kernel at a job interview only to be asked, "Is this going to make you any money?" Another put it plainly: "People don't seem to think that 'I wanted to' is good enough."

The GitHub star economy reinforces the loop — a peer-reviewed study found three out of four developers consider star counts before using a project, and a black market for fake stars has emerged, confirming that open source has developed its own attention economy where justification is currency.

What the philosophers would say about your README

Eastern philosophy offers the most radical alternative. The Taoist concept of wu wei — effortless, unforced action — suggests that the most effective creative work emerges when you stop trying to explain why you're doing it. It doesn't mean doing nothing. It means doing without the overlay of self-conscious justification. Zen Buddhism's shoshin (beginner's mind) makes a complementary point: the expert's mind is full of justifications and defenses; the beginner simply acts.

The existentialists were more confrontational. Sartre declared there are no excuses behind us nor justifications before us — seeking external validation is what he called bad faith. Nietzsche's parable of the three metamorphoses maps the journey: the camel bears duty, the lion destroys old values, but only the child can truly create, because the child acts from play, not from permission.

Psychology adds an empirical warning. The overjustification effect (Lepper, Greene, and Nisbett, 1973) showed that children who expected rewards for drawing drew 50% less when rewards were removed. External reasons crowded out internal ones. When we force ourselves to articulate external "why"s for creative work, we risk the same shift — the justification becomes the reason, and when it stops working, so does the motivation.

The distinction that actually matters

The research converges on a line that's easy to state and hard to internalize: the problem is not reflection — it's permission-seeking.

Articulating your "why" to yourself is generative. It clarifies thinking and connects work to purpose. But most justification isn't self-reflection — it's a disclaimer addressed to an imagined audience. The Hacker News commenter who will ask "why does this need to exist?", the LinkedIn connection who will wonder if this career move was smart, the internal voice that sounds like every authority figure who ever evaluated you.

Social media creates permanent audiences. Hustle culture demands everything serve a purpose. GitHub stars quantify your relevance. Each system teaches the same lesson: you must justify your existence before you're allowed to exist. The Italian who grants status to leisure, the Taoist painter who lets qi flow through the brush, the child in Nietzsche's parable — these aren't just abstractions. They're evidence that the justification imperative was built. It can be unbuilt.