Have high expectations for yourself!

In this post I want to explore how the standards we hold ourselves to affect the way we view other people. So I’m going to write about the standards that I hold myself to because I have better insight into my own standards and viewpoints than I do into anyone else’s. The particular standards I mention may not be right, but I am pretty confident that there is a universal obligation to push ourselves out of our comfort zones in order to do good.

Also, I believe there is such a thing that there is objective goodness in the world. Bu if you don’t I think my reasoning will be applicable to you as long you have some standards that you wish everybody would follow (e.g., if you believe that “setting aside 30 minutes every afternoon for tea and biscuits” is a standard that everyone in your life should follow, then replace the words “do good” in the rest of this post with “set aside 30 minutes every day for tea and biscuits”).

Claim #1: We should all strive all our lives to do good more perfectly, and doing that requires holding ourselves to high standards

Holding myself to high standards means being kind of nitpicky with myself — being vigilant about times when I may not be doing as much good as I could be, and pushing myself to do better. I’m causing animals to be tortured by eating meat, so I’ll be vegetarian. I’ve been quiet about how the way we live our lives contributes to systemic racism, so I’m trying to speak out more. I waste too much time on YouTube so I should stop watching Jake Gyllenhaal interviews — I haven’t been as successful on this front (my favorite).

Once I’ve identified a standard I want to hold myself to, I can motivate myself by thinking about how this standard really ought to be followed by everyone and isn’t just some arbitrary rule I’ve decided to follow — this isn’t the case with all the standards I try to hold myself too, but it is with a lot of them. If I’m at a restaurant and there’s a great-looking steak on the menu, I can convince myself to not order it because I think it would be wrong for anyone in my position to contribute to cows being tortured, and would be disappointed in myself if I did something I thought was wrong.

Claim #2: It’s not reasonable nor good to expect others to be perfectly good all the time, and other people will often fail to meet the high standards we try to hold ourselves to

This leads to a problem: If I’m disappointed in myself when I don’t meet my own standards, and I believe the standards I hold myself too are common standards (i.e., they’re not just unique to me; other people should follow them too), then there’s danger in me constantly being disappointed in other people when they don’t meet these common standards.

So what do I do when other people don’t meet these standards that I set for myself? If I know that I would look down on myself if I ordered a meat dish, does that mean I should look down on other people when they order meat dishes?

Basically, in trying to improve myself, I’m in danger of slipping into judgement of others. I propose five rules of thumb to help keep this at bay:

  • Hold yourself to high standards

    • Consistently push yourself out of your comfort zone to be a better person

  • Recognize that not every standard you hold yourself to is a common standard

    • e.g., I limit the amount of TV I watch because I generally don’t get very much out of it for the time I put in, but that’s not the case for everyone

  • Recognize that other people have life struggles that you don’t, which may make it harder for them to meet even those standards that are common

    • e.g., I think that everyone should do as much as they can to help other people, and that I and many others struggle with not being selfless enough. But I know that there are also people who struggle with making sure to take care of themselves enough (not to imply that being selfless and self-care are opposites, but they can appear to be in conflict sometimes). So I shouldn’t tell someone “be more selfless” unless I was reasonably sure that self-care wasn't something they struggled with (and even so I probably wouldn’t phrase it like that)

    • It helps to remember that you don’t always meet the ideal standards either

  • If you are in the appropriate position to do so, encourage others as best you can to act better

    • What the most effective way of  “encouraging others to be better” looks like varies depending on the situation and your relationship to the other people:

      • It may mean saying nothing and leading by example

      • It may mean having a conversation with them about their actions and/or motivations and really listening to them

      • It may mean encouraging them to do better

      • It may mean calling people out explicitly and telling them to be better (especially if behavior is particularly egregious or you are in a position of authority like a teacher or a boss or a parent)

    • You also need to be open to others encouraging you to be better

  • Be open about your beliefs, but focus your attention on where your attention can make the largest positive impact

    • Here’s an example of me trying to live this out: I think that both looting and the perpetuation of systemic racism are evil acts. But when I have conversations with people recently I always tried to focus on systemic racism, because that is the bigger problem, and the one that I’m more likely to be able to contribute to progress on. If I were in the position of the people who had the opportunity to loot during recent protests, I would hope I would hold myself to the standard of “don’t steal”. But I was not in that position, and as it is it would be wrong to focus on the fact that people looting weren’t meeting the moral standard of not stealing while ignoring the way society fails to meet the moral standard of not being racist

Articulating these rules of thumb has helped me resolve the cognitive dissonance I hold myself to higher standards than others (though I’m sure there are areas where I hold others to higher standards than I hold myself, which is wrong to do). Maybe it will help you too! Or maybe this cognitive dissonance was just a problem for me and all I’ve done is climbed out of a hole I dug myself in the first place.