You know your reasons. Grant them theirs.

Psychology has a name for the oldest unfair math in the human head, and two people in these conversations reached for it independently: the fundamental attribution error — a real, named research finding, not a proverb. Its shape: when I behave badly, my circumstances get the blame. When they behave badly, their character does. When you cut someone off in traffic, there was a reason — the merge, the kids screaming, the terrible morning. When they cut you off, they’re simply a menace. Same act. Two verdicts. Mercy flows in exactly one direction.

Someone compressed the asymmetry into a single sentence: we judge ourselves by our intent, and others by their actions. You have front-row seats to your own reasons and no seats at all to anyone else’s — so their behavior arrives context-free, and character is the laziest available explanation.

Which led one person to the stronger conclusion: it isn’t that you shouldn’t judge — it’s that you can’t, not competently. Their worked example was a grocery cart full of junk food and the instant verdict it invites about someone’s self-care. Except: maybe it’s for a party. Maybe for someone else. Maybe it’s the only diet a whole childhood ever taught. The judgment isn’t just unkind; it’s unqualified — issued by someone holding a fifth of the file. The same person extended it to comparison, and it cuts the same way: you can’t measure yourself against a life you know one dimension of. Only a whole-life trade would be a fair comparison, and there’s a page here about what that test reveals.

The honest boundary ships with the correction: this is for snap verdicts on strangers and single moments. When someone behaves exactly the way they’ve behaved a dozen times, as one objector noted, the pattern is real information — granting reasons never means erasing records.

For everything else, there’s the line one person’s father handed down, the kind that gets passed along because it’s the whole page in a sentence: nobody’s above or below you — everyone’s doing their best with the cards they were dealt. You’ve always known your reasons. The practice is one flash of remembering: so do they.