If reasoning is the flight from Problem-town to Solution City, rationalization is the return ticket.

We often get into trouble not by accident but by our own means. It is not that we don't know something is a problem. It's not that some things that are bad are a surprise to us. Quite often we convince ourselves that the rewards for doing something bad outweigh the consequences. We are willing to get into trouble because the payoff is worth the trouble. Not that there is just risk. There is no risk because we know for sure that we are going into a bad situation. It's just that we expect to walk away from it better than we when we walked into it. That's the kind of rationalization I am talking about.
Not to say that all rationalization is bad.  You can go down that road but not too far. Why? Keep in mind it's still the road to Problem-town. We tend to forget that and end up where we started in the first place: in a whole heap of trouble.

Maybe it also means that we have to keep solving problems to keep getting solutions. We have enough problems as it is, creating more will just stack the odds against us.