I found myself sneering at the woman in the coffee shop this morning—the one with paint under her fingernails and exhaustion in her eyes, telling her friend about quitting her corporate job to pursue art full-time. “How irresponsible,” I thought with satisfying righteousness. “Some of us have responsibilities. Some of us can’t just chase whims.”
But as I walked back to my own sterile office, keys jangling with the weight of thirty-nine years of playing it safe, I realized the woman had committed only one true crime: she had done what I dream about every morning in the shower, when I imagine what my life might look like if courage outnumbered excuses.
Why do we reserve our harshest judgment for people who are living our unlived lives?
There’s a particular venom we save for those who dare to do what we’ve told ourselves is impossible, impractical, or irresponsible. The friend who travels the world while we cite mortgage payments and career stability. The colleague who starts their own business while we list all the reasons entrepreneurship is too risky. The neighbor who leaves an unhappy marriage while we explain why “sticking it out” is more mature.
We call it realism. We call it wisdom. We call it having our priorities straight. But it’s actually something much more primitive: it’s the rage of the caged animal watching another of its species run free.
Our judgment serves a function. It protects the careful architecture of limitation we’ve built around our own lives. If we can convince ourselves that the people doing what we secretly want to do are foolish, selfish, or deluded, then our own inaction becomes not cowardice but wisdom. Our fear becomes prudence. Our settling becomes virtue.
But observe what happens when these judgments slip out in conversation. They carry too much heat, too much specificity, too much personal investment to be mere observations. They vibrate with the frequency of our own suppressed longing. We don’t judge randomly—we judge precisely along the fault lines of our own denied desires.
The woman who criticizes others for “oversharing” probably aches to be more vulnerable. The man who rolls his eyes at “attention seekers” might be dying to be seen. The person who mocks “unrealistic dreamers” is usually someone whose own dreams were buried so long ago they’ve forgotten where they’re buried.
I think about my harshest judgments and realize they form a perfect map of my own disowned wanting. I judge people who speak up in meetings—because I sit silent when I have things to say. I judge people who seem confident—because I wrestle daily with self-doubt. I judge people who ask for what they need—because I’ve convinced myself that needing is weakness.
The judgment isn’t really about them. It’s about the uncomfortable recognition that what we’ve decided is impossible for us is apparently possible for others. They are living proof that our limitations might be chosen rather than inevitable, that our fears might be surmountable rather than insurmountable, that our excuses might be…excuses.
This is why we don’t judge people for doing things we have no interest in doing. I don’t feel hostile toward people who love rock climbing because I genuinely don’t want to climb rocks. But I do feel something complicated toward people who quit jobs to write books, who move to foreign countries, who start over at forty, who choose passion over security—because these are things I think about when I can’t sleep.
The cruelest irony is that the people we judge are often the ones we most need to learn from. They’ve found ways to navigate the gap between wanting and having, between dreaming and doing, between the life they inherited and the life they chose. They’ve faced the same fears we face and found ways through them.
But instead of asking “How did you find the courage?” we ask “How could you be so reckless?” Instead of curiosity, we offer criticism. Instead of learning, we limit—both them and ourselves.
What if our judgment is actually a form of reconnaissance—our psyche’s way of studying the territory we’re too afraid to explore? What if the people we criticize most harshly are our unconscious teachers, showing us roads we could take if we were willing to admit we want to take them?
The woman in the coffee shop probably doesn’t know that her decision to chase art represents someone else’s highest aspiration. She doesn’t know that her courage is someone else’s condemnation. She doesn’t know that in pursuing her own authenticity, she’s inadvertently holding up a mirror to everyone who passes by, reflecting back their own unlived possibilities.
Tomorrow, when I catch myself judging someone for doing what I secretly want to do, I want to try something different. Instead of criticism, I want to try curiosity. Instead of “How could they?” I want to ask “How did they?” Instead of judgment, I want to try gratitude—because people living their authentic lives are reminders that such living is possible.
Because the person in the mirror isn’t the enemy. They’re the future self we’re afraid we’ll never become—unless we stop judging them long enough to ask them for directions to where they are.