"IF CAPABLE" pretty much gives me the authority to not waste a valuable communication/information tool by monitoring guard. Fortunately I work for a company that "gets it" and does not require us to monitor guard if we feel like we can use our radios more effectively.

I have been able to obtain invaluable information about weather at my destination, airport closures, etc by monitoring company and other frequencies more times than I can count, a few times this has allowed me to start coordinating a diversion long before I would have been able to otherwise or has helped me find ways around weather from company guys out ahead as we try to navigate the nastier weather of the lower flight levels.

One specific example.... A few years ago I was on my first trip off of IOE at my old company, we're flying across the Rockies in the winter, monitoring ARINC and we hear another aircraft calling their dispatch after their second failed attempt to get in their destination. Their destination happened to be our alternate. We ended up calling our dispatch, got our alternate changed because of the worse than forecast weather there. We ended up flying to our destination, going missed, and then diverting to the new alternate. We landed at the new alternate with min fuel plus 10 minutes. Not a fun situation but we made it. However, had we been monitoring guard we may have been clueless to the weather events unfolding below us and could have ended up not getting a new alternate and finding ourselves in a very terrible situation.

Furthermore, never has monitoring 121.5 provided me with any benefit. Granted, I'm a lower time guy who hasn't missed a handoff (YET, I'm sure it will probably happen), but if ATC forgets to hand me off there are other methods for re-establishing contact such as having other aircraft retransmit a new freq to me, or I'm just going to look at my chart and pull up the center frequency for the sector I am currently in and give that sector a call. Not a great situation, but not the end of the world.

So if you want to call me incorrect and unprofessional for not continuously monitoring 121.5, so be it. I'm willing to take that hit in order to monitor the frequencies that are going to give me the information that can save my career and/or potentially my life.