You hit the nail on the head, IMO.

> Individuals feel the need to frame or justify and defend their individual actions and desires.

This, exactly this. I only recently realized this has been a huge factor for almost my entire life. There was always something more important to do than what I wanted. Parents wanted me to do things. School wanted me to do things. Religion wanted me to do things (courtesy of growing up in a proselytising Christianity-adjacent cult, 1/10 would not recommend). Later, in adulthood, it's family expectations again, then relationships, and then of course, work. The sum total of things I'm supposed to be doing, and that reflect good on me when I'm seen busy doing them, is effectively unbounded, leaving no place for any "selfish desire" such as... IDK, relaxing, taking a walk, clearing my head, watching stupid shit on the Internet.

Of course, those desires don't go away just because there's always something more important to do. But I can't just satisfy them without feeling like having to justify to myself and others, why I'm doing the "me thing" instead of the "important thing". Might be why I've struggled with procrastination all my adulthood - "I'm working" gets others off my back, and then it's only me I have to justify my choices to.

(As a kid, I didn't do "new toy to get my homework done faster", but I sure did the other thing - a computer to help me learn. It was a great argument, because it was partially true and my parents also heard it from adult sources (e.g. news programs).)

I'm not really sure why I do it, and why many others seem to. Some kind of insecurity? Like, I want to escape the neverending demands of other people without hurting my relationships with them, so I justify it in a way that makes fulfilling my own needs sound like either a) a critical, unavoidable maintenance work, something that's not really a choice, or b) it's actually doing them a favor, or c) it's capital-I Important. It's preemptively denying others the ability to counter "hey, what about me and my needs". A form of conflict avoidance, I guess.

I envy people who can just take vacations, or do hobbies, or whatever, without guilt or the need to justify it to others.