What does it mean that bad faith and self-deception?

Pretending you have no choice when you do is the core existential dishonesty.

Example: Marcus had been practicing law for fourteen years. He did not love it. He did not hate it. He occupied it the way furniture occupies a room — present, functional, never questioned. When friends asked if he enjoyed his work, he said what he always said: "It is what it is. I have a mortgage, two kids in private school, and a wife who left her career to raise them. What am I supposed to do?" The sentence sounded like a description of constraint. It was actually a description of choice — a choice to prioritize financial security, social status, and the particular arrangement of his family life over the discomfort of change. There was nothing wrong with that choice. But Marcus was not making it. He was pretending it had been made for him by circumstance, by responsibility, by the shape of his life. The mortgage was real. The children were real. The obligation was real. But "What am I supposed to do?" was not an honest question. It was a rhetorical device that transformed an ongoing choice into an imposed fate, relieving Marcus of the vertigo that would come with admitting: I am choosing this, every day, and I could choose differently, and I am afraid of what that would mean.

Try this: Select a situation in your life where you regularly tell yourself "I have no choice." Write out the full narrative you use to explain why you are stuck — every constraint, every obligation, every reason this situation is simply given. Then rewrite the same situation using only active-voice sentences that begin with "I choose" or "I am choosing." For example, "I have to stay in this job" becomes "I am choosing to stay in this job because I value the financial security it provides more than I value the discomfort of searching for alternatives." Notice the emotional difference between the two versions. The second version may feel heavier, more uncomfortable, more exposing. That discomfort is the weight of acknowledged freedom. It is what bad faith exists to avoid.