Sartre on Bad Faith, for Anyone Who Says "I Have No Choice"

A waiter in a Paris café comes toward the tables “with a step a little too quick.” He bends forward “a little too eagerly” and carries his tray “with the recklessness of a tight-rope-walker,” his gestures running like clockwork, each one regulating the next. Jean-Paul Sartre put this man into Being and Nothingness (Gallimard, 1943), and gave the verdict in a single line of Hazel Barnes’s 1956 translation: “he is playing at being a waiter in a café.”

The waiter is Sartre’s best-known example of bad faith, his name for lying to yourself about your own freedom: treating a choice as if it were a fixed fact about you, or a fact as if it had no hold on you. Anyone trying to unfuck their life should check the sentence “I have no choice” for it first, because that sentence is almost always half true, and bad faith lives in the half that isn’t.

The detail most readers skip comes a page later. The waiter knows exactly what his job asks of him: “the obligation of getting up at five o’clock, of sweeping the floor of the shop before the restaurant opens, of starting the coffee pot going.” Then Sartre adds that the man performs all this “as if it were not my free choice to get up each morning at five o’clock or to remain in bed, even though it meant getting fired.”

Staying in bed and getting fired is an option. It is a terrible option, and Sartre does not pretend otherwise. His claim is narrower and more irritating than “you can do anything”: that a person who calls an expensive choice an impossibility has told himself something false, and that the falsehood is doing work for him.

What is bad faith, and why does “I have no choice” count as it?

Sartre opens the chapter (Part One, Chapter Two, “Bad Faith”) by asking how self-deception is even possible. An ordinary lie needs two people. In bad faith, he writes, “the one to whom the lie is told and the one who lies are one and the same person,” which means “I must know in my capacity as deceiver the truth which is hidden from me in my capacity as the one deceived.” You cannot hide a thing from yourself without knowing where you put it.

His answer rests on a pair of terms. Facticity is everything already true of you: your body, your past, your debts, your job, the city you live in. Transcendence is the fact that you are never only those things, because you are always projecting past them toward something you might do next. A healthy life, for Sartre, keeps both in view. Bad faith, he says, “seeks to affirm their identity while preserving their differences,” sliding from one to the other whenever the slide is convenient.

“I have no choice” is facticity used as a shield. It takes something you are doing, and could stop doing at a price, and files it under things that simply are. The waiter tries to become a waiter the way “this inkwell is an inkwell,” solid and finished, so that the five o’clock alarm stops being a decision he renews every morning and becomes a property of the job.

People in a mess use the same move in a hundred small forms. “I’m just not a morning person.” “That’s how my family is.” “I can’t quit, I’d lose the health insurance.” Some of these are accurate descriptions of real constraints. The tell is the grammar of permanence: the sentence describes a thing you do as a thing you are.

Bad faith runs in two directions

The waiter is only half of Sartre’s chapter. His first example is a woman on a first date who lets a man take her hand and then leaves it lying there, “neither consenting nor resisting,” because her aim is “to postpone the moment of decision as long as possible.” Later he describes a man who admits every individual act his friend accuses him of but refuses the label the friend wants him to accept, insisting that his case is always “different,” a matter of “bad luck” and a past already behind him.

These two cases point in opposite directions, which matters for anyone diagnosing their own life. One escapes into facticity (“this is just what I am”); the other escapes into transcendence (“that was never really me”). Sartre’s comment on the title of a play by Jean Sarment, I Am Too Great for Myself, covers the second move bluntly: a formula like that is “the source of an infinity of excuses for our failures or our weaknesses.”

What you hear yourself say	Which half it hides	A more accurate version
“I have no choice but to stay in this job.”	That staying is chosen, repeatedly	“I’m choosing the job over the risk of three months without income.”
“I’m just someone who can’t get up.”	That waking is an act, done or not done, each day	“I haven’t got up on time in a while, and I keep making the same call at 7 a.m.”
“That wasn’t the real me.”	That the past acts are yours	“I did that, more than once, and I can do something else next.”
“Once things calm down I’ll start.”	That waiting is itself a decision	“I’m postponing, and I don’t know what would make me stop.”
“My family / city / brain made me this way.”	That a conditioned life still leaves some margin	“This shaped me a lot. Here is the part I still steer.”

The second column is where self-help usually goes wrong. Most advice for people whose lives have come apart attacks only the first kind of bad faith, the fatalist kind, and cheers on the second. “You can be anyone” is as much a flight from facticity as “I can’t change” is a flight from freedom. The person rebuilding a life after a bad few years needs both halves said plainly: these are the facts, and these facts do not finish the sentence.

Was Sartre too hard on people whose lives are actually hard?

Yes, and the first person to say so was Simone de Beauvoir. In The Prime of Life (1960; Peter Green’s English translation, 1962) she recalls arguing with Sartre in 1940, while he was drafting the philosophy that became Being and Nothingness. They argued about “the relationship between ‘situation’ and freedom.” Her objection was concrete: “what sort of transcendence could a woman shut up in a harem achieve?” Sartre replied that even that life could be lived in different ways. She held out a long time, made “only a token submission,” and then wrote, two decades later, “Basically I was right.”

She put the argument into print in The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947; Bernard Frechtman’s translation, 1948). Some people, she wrote, have no tools at all to contest the world that confines them, and “ignorance and error are facts as inescapable as prison walls.” Their conduct can only be judged inside that situation. The test changes once a door appears: “once there appears a possibility of liberation, it is resignation of freedom not to exploit the possibility.”

Sartre came round. In a 1969 interview with New Left Review (issue I/58, published as “Itinerary of a Thought”), he reread a line from one of his own wartime prefaces, “Whatever the circumstances, and wherever the site, a man is always free to choose to be a traitor or not,” and said: “it’s incredible, I actually believed that!” What he kept was smaller and, for most readers, more useful. “A man can always make something out of what is made of him,” he said, and he described freedom as a “small movement” by which a person shaped almost entirely by circumstance still does not hand back exactly what circumstance gave him.

This revision is the one to carry around. It lets you admit the harem walls in your own life, which might be a disability, a debt, a dependent, or a city with no jobs, without granting those walls the whole floor plan. The question shifts from “am I free?” to “where, inside this, is the small movement?”

Does believing you have a choice actually change behavior?

Psychologists have tried to test something like this. In 2008, Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler reported in Psychological Science that students who read a passage arguing free will is an illusion cheated more on a later arithmetic task. The finding spread quickly, often retold as proof that fatalism makes people behave worse.

It has not held up well. A direct replication in the Open Science Collaboration’s 2015 project did not reproduce it, and a set of five studies by Thomas Nadelhoffer and colleagues (Cognition, 2020, cited here from its abstract and secondary summaries) reported that their efforts were “largely unsuccessful” and that shifting people’s free-will beliefs robustly “is more difficult than has been implied by prior work.” A Many Labs 5 replication published the same year also found no difference in cheating between conditions.

That result is good news for Sartre’s argument, oddly. If reading a paragraph could make you freer or less free, freedom would be a mood, and a pep talk would fix a ruined year. Bad faith is about accuracy instead: whether the sentences you tell yourself match what you are doing. Correcting them does not need a belief shift you can feel. It needs a description you can check. A related finding from animal research points the same way: Steven Maier and Martin Seligman’s 2016 rewrite of their own theory concluded that passivity is the starting state and control has to be learned, which is a lab-bench cousin of Beauvoir’s “possibility of liberation.”

The critic is in bad faith too

The least quoted part of Sartre’s chapter is the most practical for anyone planning to ask for help. After the man who won’t accept a label, Sartre turns on the friend demanding a confession, whom he calls “the champion of sincerity.” The friend wants the other man to declare what he is, once and for all, and implies that the confession will earn indulgence. Sartre’s charge is that the critic “demands of the guilty one that he constitute himself as a thing, precisely in order no longer to treat him as a thing.” Asking someone to become a fixed object so that you can forgive the object is its own evasion.

(The case Sartre uses, a gay man in 1940s France pressed to name himself, reads badly today, and the label at issue was one his society punished. The structure of the argument survives the example.)

This is the trap in a lot of accountability talk. A friend who hears “I’m such a mess” and answers “yes, you are, admit it” is asking for an identity confession. Nothing changes after one. The person either sinks into the label (facticity) or later disowns it (transcendence), and both moves are the ones Sartre described. What helps is narrower and less dramatic: someone who watches an act and does not rule on your character. Daryl Bem’s self-perception research points the same direction from psychology, suggesting that people read their own attitudes off their own behavior, so the act, observed, does more to change the self-description than a verdict ever could.

How to unfuck your life without lying in either direction

Sartre gave the lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism at the Club Maintenant in Paris in late October 1945; most sources, including Yale’s edition of the text, date it to the 29th, though a few accounts differ by a day. Skye Cleary’s account in Aeon describes an overheated room, a speaker who arrived an hour late, broken chairs, and a number of people who fainted. In the lecture (Philip Mairet’s translation) he told the story of a former student who came to him during the Occupation, torn between joining the Free French in England and staying with a mother who had already lost one son in 1940. Sartre’s advice was famously no advice: “You are free, therefore choose, that is to say, invent.” He also said that “there is no reality except in action” and that “the coward makes himself cowardly, the hero makes himself heroic.”

Read alongside Beauvoir and the 1969 interview, that lecture yields a procedure gentler than its slogans:

1. Write down every “I have no choice” you have said this month, word for word.
2. For each, fill in the missing clause: “…unless I accept ___.” Where the blank holds something you could survive, the sentence was a choice with a price, and you can now see the price.
3. Where the blank holds something you truly cannot survive or should not accept, cross it out without guilt. Beauvoir’s prison walls are real, and pretending otherwise is the second kind of bad faith.
4. From what remains, pick one act small enough to do daily and visible enough that another person could confirm it happened.
5. Ask someone to witness the act, and only the act. A good witness does not grade you; there is a practical guide to choosing one if the right person isn’t obvious.

Step four is where most people overreach, because the shame of a messy life pushes toward a grand gesture: quit, move, start over. If several things really are collapsing at once, put them in a fixed order over one long weekend rather than attacking all of them together. Sartre’s waiter had a smaller decision in front of him, renewed every day, which he had disguised as a law of nature. For most people the equivalent is just as plain. The hour you get up is decided again every morning, it is easy to describe as fixed (“I’m not a morning person”), and it is one of the few acts in a chaotic life that someone else can see without any interpretation. Either you were up or you weren’t.

That is the narrow problem DontSnooze was built around: a morning alarm that wants a short video of you up and out of bed, and that tells on you to a few friends you picked, by way of a photo you didn’t choose, when the video never comes. It takes the waiter’s private five o’clock decision and gives it witnesses, which is roughly what Beauvoir meant when she wrote that “only the freedom of others keeps each one of us from hardening in the absurdity of facticity.”

Nobody is going to fix the job, the debt, or the family by tomorrow. But the waiter’s alarm went off at five every morning, and every morning he either got up or stayed in bed, and the only false thing in the scene was his belief that the matter had been settled for him. Set yours for one fixed time this week, tell one person what that time is, and let the next seven mornings show which kind of sentence “I have no choice” really was.