"Everyone Does It": The Social Alibi That Normalizes Our Limits

Summary: The statement sounds like a sober description of reality, but it's usually a way to soften guilt and turn a personal choice into a social inevitability

Shortly before the war, I ran into an acquaintance my age at the gym who looked like she'd been up partying all night. It turned out that was exactly the reason. "This whole city is on drugs," she told me. I didn't confirm or deny it, just smiled, and marveled at the fact that she'd still made it to the gym after getting so wasted.

A few months earlier, a new client had sat down in my office. She was talking about a serious crisis in her marriage. When I asked her about her sources of support, she mentioned her friends and her sister. Then she said, "You know, in the end I'll do what everyone does..."

She was hinting that she was considering having an affair, but from experience, I knew that what she was really doing was working up the nerve to eventually tell me she was already having one. My acquaintance who said "the whole city" was on drugs was, in her own way, telling me that she herself was doing too many drugs.

Other people's limits

In my experience, when we reach for the defense of "everyone does it," we're almost never saying what we think we're saying. We think we're describing some demographic reality, but what we're actually revealing is that we've reached a point where we're doing too much of something we already find hard to justify to ourselves.

The client who hears from her friends that "everyone cheats" hasn't really polled all her friends — only the ones who validate her choices. After that, it becomes that much easier to pull up, from memory, the cases that support the way she's coping.

"Everyone" isn't a statistic — at best, it's an improvised echo chamber. Our own voice comes back to us, a little like singing in the shower. This psychological defense cuts both ways. Usually, when we use "everyone" to normalize our own behavior, we're simultaneously using "other people" to turn that same behavior into a pathology.

I remember the patient who came back from a trip to some exotic, faraway destination and reported, tut-tutting, how much cocaine the people he'd been hanging out with there were doing. "You know," I pointed out to him, "every time you see someone doing a line, they're seeing you doing a line" — much like the old joke that a "heavy drinker" is anyone who drinks more than you do.

When we roll our eyes at the acquaintances who truly went overboard, or feel shocked by the friend whose affair ended in scandal, what we're really telling ourselves is that at least we're still in control. That downward comparison lets us hold onto the illusion of health, because we're focused on the damage other people do to themselves, rather than on the slow way we're wearing down our own limits.

A social alibi

You could also think of this move as a form of psychological projection. When we struggle to bear our own guilt, or our own lack of control, we "clean" our conscience of the mud by throwing that mud onto the world around us. If everyone cheats, then my loyalty isn't a value — it's just naivety. If everyone's on Grindr, then my addiction to porn or to an app isn't a problem — it's a cultural adaptation. In other words, we're not just looking for an alibi; we're demonizing the whole of reality so that our own demons can look like law-abiding citizens. Instead of comparing ourselves to the person we'd like to be, we compare ourselves to the worst version of someone else.

This entire rhetorical maneuver — "everyone does it," and the comparison to those abstract "everyones" who supposedly "do it more than I do" — is deeply rooted in the clinical reality of addiction. In the well-known diagnostic manual, the DSM-5, one of the defining criteria for diagnosing addiction and its variants is repeated, failed attempts to cut down or control the behavior.

When we try to moderate a behavior we're not proud of, and fail, we feel a painful drop in our self-image. To bridge the gap between who we want to be and what we're actually doing, we invent ourselves a social alibi: the problem isn't me. It's not that I need to get clean, or need couples therapy, or need to end the affair, delete the app, or distance myself from friends who drink too much — practically no one actually manages to cope with life, or with marriage, without doing these things; people just don't talk about it.

Waving the white flag

In this process, we turn what used to be the bar we set for ourselves — for moral, financial, or physical health — into a fantasy that's out of step with "the real world." But that's not true. On at least one subject, after more than ten thousand hours in the clinic, I can say that the impression I've formed is that in the vast majority of monogamous relationships, partners are, in fact, faithful to each other.

It's true that over the course of a lifetime, there's a statistically high chance of finding yourself inside a "triangle" — whether as the one having the affair, the one being cheated on, or the third party. But isolated events over the course of a life don't add up to a lifestyle. For most people, the moment they found themselves in a triangle wasn't the defining peak of their lives, but usually part of one isolated crisis.

The possibility of having an affair isn't the default premise of every relationship, even after it's happened to you once — assuming, of course, that you're an ordinarily neurotic person, and that it caused you real psychological distress and soul-searching afterward. That's exactly why it bothers me so much to hear how people take the moments of crisis from the life stories of the people around them, toss them all into a blender, and mix themselves a smoothie of "this is just how everyone lives."

Taking the most painful moments of human fragility and flattening them out, just to make our own current choices feel inevitable, is both untrue and dangerous.

The next time you hear yourself saying that "everyone does it," try to check in with yourself about what exactly you're excusing. And if, faced with this piece, what comes up for you is an even more insistent claim that the behavior in question — whatever it may be — really is universal —

ask yourself whether that self-persuasion happens to correlate with just how many times you've failed to actually moderate that behavior. Could it be that the "everyone does it" defense is the white flag you're waving the moment you give up your own power to choose?

Do you need the world to be as broken as you feel, so that you won't have to change? Because the truth is that most people, most of the time, choose loyalty, moderate use of substances, and self-control — not because they're saints, or better than you, but because they know the destructive cost of losing your own limits, or because they got burned once and have been getting help ever since.

Originally published in Haaretz on March 19, 2026.