I caught myself doing it on a Tuesday call. Someone asked if I was going to take the trip to Bali I’d been talking about for months, and I heard myself say, “We’re still figuring out the timing.” There was no we. There was me, a calendar, and a flight I hadn’t booked. My partner had nothing to do with it. The trip was for me, alone, to think. And yet there I was, smuggling a phantom committee into a sentence about my own life.
Once I noticed it, I couldn’t stop noticing it. “We’re not sure about that investment.” “We’ve been thinking about moving.” “We don’t really watch much TV anymore.” A whole grammar of borrowed plurality, applied to decisions that were entirely mine.
The committee that doesn’t exist
Most people assume the royal we is a tic of CEOs and politicians, the language of corporate press releases and royal addresses. It isn’t. It’s also the language of a 44-year-old man telling a friend whether he wants pasta or rice, hedging the answer with a fictional second voter so nobody has to know that he, alone, has a preference.
The conventional read on this kind of speech is that it signals connection, partnership, healthy interdependence. What I’d been authorising, without knowing it, was a small abdication. Every “we” I used to describe a solo decision was a quiet vote against the idea that I was allowed to want something on my own.
Where the committee comes from
I grew up in a working-class family in Melbourne where decisions were never solo. The car was a household decision. The takeaway on Friday night was a household decision. Whether to fix something or replace it was, emphatically, a household decision, and the wrong answer cost real money. The plural pronoun made sense because the consequences were plural.
That trains a nervous system. Long after the consequences become individual, the grammar stays collective. You keep speaking as though five people will be affected by whether you take Wednesday off, because once upon a time five people were.
I think this is part of why the pattern hits hardest in your forties. By 44, you’ve usually accumulated enough autonomy that the committee is fictional, but enough history that the language is automatic. The mismatch is the noise.
The fawning cousin
This isn’t unrelated to a pattern Silicon Canals has covered before, the one where adults realise they keep saying yes to things they want to say no to, a pattern often called fawning. The pronoun version is similar but quieter: instead of saying yes to a specific request, you spread your preferences across an imaginary collective so that no single one of them is fully yours, fully refusable, fully visible.
You can’t be challenged on a preference if the preference belongs to a committee. You also can’t be fully met on it.
What linguists actually find
The shift between “I” and “we” isn’t neutral. Couples who use more first-person plural pronouns tend to describe their relationships in more cooperative terms, while individuals describing the dissolution of a relationship shift back toward “I” as a kind of psychological re-individuation. The pronoun is a barometer of where the self ends and the partnership begins.
What I’d been doing was the inverse. I’d been blurring the line in the opposite direction, taking decisions that were entirely individual and dressing them in collective grammar. That’s not partnership. That’s camouflage.
Pronouns shape how we narrate identity, and they shape it whether or not we’re paying attention. If you spend twenty years describing yourself as a we when you mean an I, you start to feel like a we. The committee gets harder to dissolve because you’ve been feeding it.
The small life I am actually allowed to want
Here’s what surfaced when I started catching the pronoun and rewinding. The decisions I was hedging weren’t dramatic. I wasn’t talking about leaving a relationship or quitting the company. I was talking about: a quieter weekend. A book instead of a dinner. A run alone instead of a run with a friend. A no to a podcast invitation. A yes to a slightly boring evening of reading on the balcony.
The committee wasn’t being summoned for the big things. It was being summoned for the small ones. That’s the part that bothered me.
It’s almost easier to claim full agency over a major life decision, because you can dress it up in language about purpose and growth. The small preferences are harder. They have no narrative cover. Wanting to skip the dinner is just wanting to skip the dinner. There’s no moral case. There’s just a self with a preference.
And a self with a preference, in a household that taught you preferences were expensive, is a self that learned to disguise itself.
The link to a pattern I keep finding
In a piece I wrote last week about turning down invitations, I noticed I was still flinching at a contract no one was asking me to sign anymore. The committee pronoun is a close relative. It’s the same flinch, expressed in grammar instead of behaviour. You’re declining something nobody asked you to decline. You’re consulting a committee that disbanded twenty years ago. You’re asking permission from people who aren’t in the room.
The good news, if there is any, is that the pattern is auditable. Pronouns are short. They show up dozens of times an hour. You can catch them.
The audit
I’ve been doing something embarrassingly simple for the last week. When I hear myself say “we” about a decision, I pause and ask whether there’s actually a we. Sometimes there is. My partner and I genuinely do co-decide a lot of things, and the plural is honest. But when the answer is no, when the “we” is fictional, I rewind and say it again with the right pronoun.
“I’m still figuring out the timing.”
It feels almost rude. That’s the tell. A sentence that accurately describes my own life shouldn’t feel like an act of aggression, and the fact that it does means the muscle has atrophied. I’ve been outsourcing my preferences for so long that reclaiming them feels like a power grab.
It isn’t a power grab. It’s a correction.
Why this matters more than it sounds
The capacity to make a clear choice is partly a capacity to locate the chooser. If the chooser is a vague collective, the choice gets fuzzy. If the chooser is named, the choice tightens up.
This is part of why research ethics frameworks for adults with diminished decision-making capacity spend so much time on the question of who, exactly, is consenting. The presumption of competence rides on the presumption of an identifiable self doing the consenting. When a healthy adult voluntarily blurs that self into a fictional we, they are doing something philosophically odd. They’re voluntarily diluting the very thing the framework is trying to protect.
Nobody has impaired my capacity to decide whether I want pasta or rice. I’ve been impairing it myself, with grammar.
The quieter version of the same problem
There’s a version of this that shows up in people who never quite say what they want. Behavioural patterns linked to constant validation-seeking often involve outsourcing preference, deferring to the room, treating one’s own taste as a draft that needs review before publication. The committee pronoun is the linguistic shadow of that behaviour. It’s the way the deferral lives in your sentences.
If you want to find it in yourself, listen for the gap between the actual stakeholder count of a decision and the pronoun you use to describe it. The bigger the gap, the more interesting the pattern.
What changes when you say I
I’m a few weeks into this and the change is smaller than I expected, which I suspect is the right size. I haven’t had a breakthrough. I haven’t restructured my life. I have, mostly, started to make slightly more accurate sentences about what I actually want on a Saturday afternoon.
The accuracy is the gift. When you say I, you find out what you want. When you say we, the wanting gets diffused before it can fully form. By 44, I’ve spent enough years diffusing my own wanting that finding it intact feels like a small archaeological discovery.
The committee was always fictional. The life is not. And the life I am actually allowed to want, the small one, is mostly populated by preferences that have been waiting, quietly, for a pronoun that fits them.
I’m trying to give them one.
Feature image by Pavel Danilyuk on Pexels
