Who are you to judge?

It’s human nature to measure ourselves against others.

Career progression, artistic talent, wealth, experiences—we can fall into the habit of looking towards others before looking at ourselves. We might even find that our happiness becomes dependent on these comparisons.

But are these comparisons accurate? And more importantly, are they useful?

I. Judgement

Consider that we may never be able to accurately judge someone.

Whether we love them or hate them, envy them or pity them. These feelings aren’t really about them, they’re about the idea we have of them.

The only person we truly understand—and even then it can be difficult—is ourselves. Other people in our lives are a matter of perception.

What we know about other people, our ability to understand them, comes only from what we observe. The way we see them act, the stories and secrets they choose to share. We only know what they choose to share with us.

And with this, there will always be gaps—things that we’ll never fully know or understand about them. And so when we think about them, we fill these gaps.

There are many ways that we tend to fill these gaps in our understanding.

Most prominent is by filling these gaps with the only person we do fully understand—ourselves.

We project our wants and desires onto friends and strangers alike. We judge their actions based on our principles and their position based on our lived experience.

In other cases, we may fill those gaps with failings to make ourselves feel better in comparison. Or we may fill those gaps with perfection to further validate our insecurities.

The most common and distorted example of this may be social media, but this same principle applies to some degree to everyone we meet. We rarely know for certain how they feel day-to-day in their jobs, what they’re sacrificing in their lives, or whether they are happy and finding meaning in their actions. And yet we judge them as if we do.

When we compare ourselves to others we should try to remember this.

Our judgments are often as much about ourselves as they are about them. And in nearly every case it is meant to reinforce a worldview we hold—for better or for worse.

II. Utility

With the understanding that these judgments are often flawed, is there value in them?

I don’t think we can ever rid ourselves of these biases when judging others. But we can learn to examine them and learn something deeper about ourselves in the process—something more important than what could come from the judgment itself.

When we find ourselves in envy or pity, love or hate, approval or disapproval—when we find ourselves judging someone else—we can ask “What is the root of this idea?”

We can examine its accuracy:

• Are we feeling envious of something that we intentionally choose not to prioritize, forgetting what we have?
• Are we extrapolating what we’re exposed to about this person and assuming an image of perfection? An image of failure?

We can try to understand what it is telling us:

• Is it something we had never considered about ourselves?
• Does it expose misalignment between our intentions and actions?
• Are we trying to cope with our decisions?
• Does this perception reinforce an image of insecurity or confidence?

Judgments may be as educational as they are fickle.

To forgive others is to forgive ourselves.

To understand others is to understand ourselves.

To let go of our judgments is to accept ourselves.

2021-10-24