Why you shouldn’t Judge Yourself

You shouldn’t judge yourself for the same reason that BP shouldn’t run an environmental impact study on oil drilling.

You’re not qualified, because you’re biased.

You also don’t have enough data.

If you were really to have a chance at judging yourself accurately, you’d need a large enough sample set of other people to compare yourself against, from a range of social groups. You’d need to use some kind of objective set of criteria to choose data points, and then have the information collected scientifically.

Are you fat?

Are you attractive?

Are you smart?

Did you perform a certain task well?

How would you know? How could you know?

Unless you have a team of scientists on hand to do the research and comparative study, you just have two choices:

1) Keep an open mind

2) Judge yourself, inaccurately

So how do you know what you’re like? You don’t, and no-one else does either.

The truth is interesting, unusual. It’s doesn’t fit into neat little boxes. How you perceive things can change. Things you perceive can change. You probably have an idea, but it’s not the truth, just one version of it.

If you’re like me, interested in self discovery, then the idea that you can’t really judge yourself objectively is a bit scary. But I believe it’s true that you can’t. I hope this idea will help me be more fluid, and less judgemental.