Welcome back to another Question of the Week here at The Confusing Middle!

Last week, Gregory Stock sent us down a fairly spooky rabbit hole, asking whether we believe in ghosts or evil spirits — and then, as a follow-up, whether we’d be willing to spend a night alone in a remote, supposedly haunted house. My answers were yes and absolutely not, in that order, which I stand by completely. Believing in something and voluntarily going to find it in an abandoned building at midnight are two very different commitments, and I am firmly in the camp of people who would like to keep that distance indefinitely.

This week, Stock pivots from the supernatural to something that might actually be more unsettling to sit with — because it’s not about ghosts in old houses. It’s about the ghost that lives in the mirror.

This week’s question: Do you judge others by higher or lower standards than you judge yourself?

My Answer: Higher. Definitely Higher.

I want to be upfront about the fact that this is not a comfortable question for me to answer. Not because I’m unsure of my answer — I’m fairly certain — but because being certain of it doesn’t exactly reflect well on me, and part of the whole point of this series is to actually be honest rather than to present a carefully curated version of myself that comes across as admirably self-aware and emotionally evolved.

So here it is: I hold myself to higher standards than I hold other people. Across the board, in most areas of my life, I expect more from myself than I would ever think to expect from someone else in the same situation.

And before you say “well, that sounds kind of noble” — I’d push back on that, because I don’t think it is. Not entirely. Not once you look at what that pattern actually produces.

The Professional Side of It

At work, this shows up clearly. When someone else makes a mistake — misses a deadline, drops a ball on a project, sends an email that probably should have been worded differently — my instinct is genuinely charitable. People are busy. Things fall through the cracks. Nobody is operating at peak capacity every single moment of every single day, and extending grace to the people around me feels natural and right.

When I make those same mistakes, something very different happens. The internal accounting is immediate and thorough. I notice the error, I catalog it, I replay the moment it could have been avoided, and I carry it forward in a way I would never expect anyone else to carry a comparable stumble. There’s no equivalent grace extended inward. The standard I’d apply to a colleague in the same situation — “that happens, move on” — becomes somehow inapplicable the moment it’s me we’re talking about.

I don’t think this is entirely unhealthy. Caring about the quality of your work, wanting to do better, refusing to be cavalier about mistakes — these aren’t bad things. But there’s a version of holding yourself to high standards that tips over into something less productive. When the standard stops being motivating and starts being punishing, when you’re not learning from a mistake so much as just serving a kind of internal sentence for it, the higher standard stops working for you and starts working against you.

In Relationships

This is where it gets a little more tangled. In relationships — friendships, family, the way we move through the world with the people around us — I think the higher-standard tendency shows up in a specific way for me. I am much quicker to forgive other people for the kinds of relational failures I would find very hard to forgive in myself.

If a friend goes quiet for a while, doesn’t respond to messages as quickly as they used to, seems distracted or distant — my default read is that life is happening for them, that they have things going on I don’t know about, that the friendship is fine and I should give them space. That instinct feels correct to me. People aren’t obligated to be constantly available, and assuming the worst about someone’s absence is usually more about my own anxiety than about anything they’ve actually done.

But when I’m the one who’s gone quiet? When I’m the one who let a conversation drop or took too long to respond or missed something I should have caught? I hold that differently. The same charitable interpretation I’d extend to someone else is much harder to apply to myself. There’s a voice that says the other person deserved better, that I should have done more, that the standard I’d consider perfectly reasonable for everyone else doesn’t somehow apply to me.

I’m aware this is not logical. It’s also, I suspect, not uncommon.

On Moral and Ethical Failures

Here’s the part of this question I find genuinely difficult to sit with. When it comes to moral and ethical failures — moments where someone acted badly, made a wrong choice, hurt someone through carelessness or selfishness — I think I am, on balance, a fairly compassionate observer of other people’s failures. I believe in nuance. I believe that most people are doing their best with what they have, that context matters enormously, that the gap between who we want to be and who we manage to be in a given moment is wide for basically everyone.

I carry that compassion forward for others much more easily than I carry it for myself. My own moral failures — the moments I said something unkind, acted out of selfishness, let someone down when they needed me — don’t get the same nuanced treatment. They sit differently. They’re harder to set down.

Part of me thinks this is appropriate. Accountability matters. Taking your own failures seriously is part of what it means to actually be trying to be a better person. But there’s a version of that — a version I’m not entirely sure I’m innocent of — where the higher standard isn’t really about growth at all. Where it’s more about punishment than improvement. Where the refusal to extend grace inward isn’t rigor so much as it is a habit of self-criticism that’s been running so long it’s started to feel like virtue.

That’s a harder thing to look at honestly.

Creativity and Ambition

I’d be leaving something important out if I didn’t mention this one, because I think it’s where the double standard shows up in the most visible way for me, given how much of my life involves making things and putting them out into the world.

When I read someone else’s writing — a blog post, a book, an essay — I am a generous reader. I look for what’s working. I appreciate the effort. I understand that not everything lands perfectly, that some pieces are stronger than others, that the attempt itself has value. I would never apply to someone else’s creative output the kind of scrutiny I quietly apply to my own.

My own work gets a much harder look. A post that isn’t as sharp as I wanted it to be, a sentence that doesn’t quite do what I needed it to do, an idea that felt better before I tried to execute it — these don’t get the same charitable reading I’d give a stranger’s work, or even a friend’s. I am my own toughest audience, by a considerable margin, and while some of that drives quality, some of it just makes the whole thing harder than it needs to be.

So What Do We Do With This?

I don’t have a tidy conclusion here, because I’m not sure the answer is to simply lower my standards for myself in order to achieve some kind of internal equity. That doesn’t feel right either. What I think I’m actually after is something more like consistency — not lowering the bar for myself, but extending inward the same basic good faith I already extend outward without much effort.

The standard itself might be fine. The distribution of grace is what needs work.

Stock’s question this week doesn’t have a comfortable answer, at least not for me. But it has an honest one, and I think that’s worth something.

Your Turn

Alright — I want to hear how you land on this one, because I genuinely think the answers are going to vary more than people expect.

Do you hold yourself to higher or lower standards than you hold the people around you? And does it shift depending on the area of life — are you harder on yourself professionally but easier on yourself in relationships, or some other combination? Has the pattern ever caused you a problem you had to actively work to correct?

Drop your thoughts in the comments. I’d love to know whether you find your answer flattering, uncomfortable, or somewhere in between.

Until next week, this is Aaron, still here at The Confusing Middle, still working through Gregory Stock’s questions one uncomfortable truth at a time.