I watched my friend make a catastrophic life choice and thought, with absolute certainty, "I would never."
I was, at that exact moment, making an equally catastrophic choice in a completely different category. Same delusion, different packaging. Same denial, better aesthetics.
We are geniuses at diagnosing other people's dysfunction. Absolute prodigies. We can see their patterns from orbit. The toxic relationship they keep recycling? Obvious. The self-sabotage? Textbook.
And then we go home and do our version of the exact same thing, except ours has a different name and a better justification and we've workshopped the narrative until it sounds like a choice instead of a compulsion.
My terrible decisions wear a blazer. They come with spreadsheets and five-year plans. They sound responsible. But underneath the presentation, they're the same thing — avoiding something scary by committing to something familiar, and calling it strategy.
Their dysfunction is loud. Yours is articulate. They blow up; you shut down. They overspend on impulse; you hoard on anxiety. They stay in the wrong relationship out of fear; you avoid all relationships out of the same fear, but you call it "standards."
Same document. Different typography.
The humbling truth about judgment is that it's almost always projection with better lighting.
We're all making terrible decisions. Some of us just have better fonts.
