We are constantly assessing ourselves and our surroundings. This is normal and necessary. But another thing most people do is to make an adjustment so they seem better, both to themselves and to others. We tell themselves, “it’s pretty good considering . . .” and we fill in the adjustment. “I’m pretty good at x considering my talent level”, or “I ran a good time considering how little time I had to train.” To some extent this is healthy, both psychologically and also in terms of your life. You shouldn’t neglect your family in order to take two minutes off your 10K time. Where this gets problematic though, for yourself and for the rest of us, is when your self evaluation is done by fractions. Most people use fractions. They don’t think of it quite that way but they do it. Here’s what I mean: in the numerator people tend to place “all the stuff I have to deal with” and in the denominator they put “what I actually did”. The problem with this is that you can come up with a good, or at least tolerable number as a result if the numerator is high enough — “I was so stressed and so tired and so overwhelmed and so unsure what to do and so frazzled and that’s why it’s okay that I didn’t do jack shit about this situation”. Forget the numerator for a second, the stuff that makes things harder — what was the result?
You know lots of people who use this math to justify things in their lives. “So what if I yelled at the kids, I was tired from work.” It’s also used to either glorify or dismiss other people. “Sure Alex Harnold is a great climber but it’s easy for him because he has this brain thingy where he doesn’t feel as much fear”. Stop with that, he’s just great. “So what if Greta knows nothing about energy policy, she’s just a teenager”. Why is that an excuse?
Just stop with the fractions already. You don’t actually care about them anyway, you just use them when it’s convenient. Do you care how hard it was for the mechanic to work on your car? No, you just want it fixed right. Do you care why some tweaker stole your battery, what his circumstances were? Do you care why you were betrayed or let down? No, you don’t. Neither do other people care about the math you use to justify or explain yourself.