Use when, just after abandoning or failing at something, you catch yourself concluding "that wasn't worth reaching anyway" — the post-mortem self-deception / motivated-reasoning anti-pattern. Fires when writing a post-mortem after a failure or rollback, recording a lesson after a retreat, or when an operator/agent's stated reason for quitting smells like comfort rather than analysis. The tell: a goal re-rated as unworthy ONLY because it turned out to be unreachable — a re-rating that would have been absent had the attempt succeeded.
