The woman in front of me at the supermarket was taking an unreasonable amount of time to pay for three items. Three. I had counted them twice, partly out of boredom and partly because my patience had apparently become an endangered species. She searched through her bag, checked her pockets, apologised to the cashier and then searched through the same bag again, as though money might reproduce if given another opportunity. Behind her, the queue had developed that unmistakable British atmosphere of collective irritation disguised as impeccable manners. Nobody said anything, which naturally meant everyone was saying plenty through the ancient language of sighing. I looked at my watch, then at the woman, then at my watch again in case time had developed sympathy and decided to reverse itself.

I remember thinking, with extraordinary confidence for someone who knew absolutely nothing about her, that surely checking whether you had enough money before leaving home was not an unreasonable expectation. We live in an age where phones can remind us to drink water, watches can tell us we have been sitting too long and refrigerators, apparently, can now communicate with their owners. Yet here we were, defeated by three groceries and a handbag.

Eventually, the cashier helped her sort the payment. The woman thanked her repeatedly and hurried away. I stepped forward, paid for my shopping and continued with my day carrying an entirely unnecessary sense of superiority alongside the groceries. I had made a judgement in perhaps fifteen seconds. I knew almost nothing about her, but that had not prevented me from constructing a remarkably confident opinion.

I wonder how often we do exactly that. We observe one small piece of somebody’s life, attach an explanation to it and behave as though we have reviewed the complete evidence. A stranger raises their voice, so they are rude. A friend stops replying, so they no longer care. Someone leaves a marriage, stays in a job they complain about, refuses a family request or makes a decision we would never consider, and suddenly we become experts in circumstances we have never had to live.

And what remarkable experts we are. We can diagnose laziness from one missed appointment, selfishness from one declined invitation and poor parenting from one child crying in public. Give us a thirty-second video online and, apparently, we can determine someone’s character, upbringing, intentions and future prospects before the comments section has finished loading.

The trouble with judgement is that it can feel suspiciously similar to understanding. Both involve reaching conclusions. Both offer the satisfaction of making sense of something. The difference is that understanding leaves the door open for information we do not yet have. Judgement often prefers to close the case.

I have been guilty of this more times than I care to admit. I have looked at another person’s life from a safe distance and wondered why they could not simply do the sensible thing. Why stay in a job that makes you miserable? Why continue helping relatives who are never satisfied? Why tolerate a friendship that repeatedly disappoints you? Why remain somewhere you keep saying you want to leave? From the comfortable seats of other people’s lives, the solutions are beautifully simple. Leave. Refuse. Speak up. Walk away. It is remarkably convenient to be brave on somebody else’s behalf.

What we rarely have to carry is the cost of our own advice. The person staying in the unhappy job may have a mortgage, children or no realistic alternative waiting. Someone who struggles to establish boundaries may have spent a lifetime being taught that saying no is disloyal. A friend who becomes distant may be dealing with something they do not have the strength to explain. A person remaining in a difficult relationship may be navigating fear, dependence, history or consequences invisible to anyone standing outside it.

None of this means every decision is wise or every behaviour deserves excuse. Circumstances can explain actions without making harmful actions acceptable. Compassion should not require us to abandon discernment. We can recognise patterns, protect ourselves, hold people accountable and still admit that we may not understand everything that led them there.

The part that unsettles me most, though, is not how easily we judge other people. It is how differently we judge ourselves.

When we make a mistake, we remember the context with remarkable precision. We were exhausted. We misunderstood. We were under pressure. We had good intentions. We lacked information. There may also have been a headache deserving its own witness statement. When somebody else makes the same mistake, our imagination suddenly becomes less generous. They were careless. They should have known better. And then comes the sentence I have become increasingly suspicious of: I would never do that.

I would never is a surprisingly large claim for four small words.

How can we know what we would do under circumstances we have never encountered? How do we know how patient we would remain after months of uncertainty, how generous we would be when money became frightening, how calm we would stay after repeated humiliation or how firmly we would hold to our values when doing so suddenly cost us something we desperately wanted to keep?

It is easy to defend honesty when the truth costs nothing. Easy to admire courage when somebody else must live with the consequences. Easy to recommend forgiveness when we have not experienced the offence. Easy to praise boundaries when we are not the ones risking rejection by setting them. Sometimes we mistake the absence of temptation for the presence of virtue.

That does not mean everyone eventually abandons their principles. Some people demonstrate extraordinary integrity under enormous pressure. But imagining ourselves inside a difficult situation is not the same as having been tested by it. Until life places the weight in our own hands, perhaps we know less about our limits than we like to believe.

There is another uncomfortable detail: some of the traits we criticise most enthusiastically in other people occasionally turn up in ourselves wearing better clothes. We complain about people who interrupt, then catch ourselves preparing a response before someone has finished speaking. We dislike arrogance but enjoy being proved right. We criticise attention-seeking and still feel disappointed when our own effort goes unnoticed. We condemn gossip and then join a conversation beginning with the reassuring phrase, “I’m not judging, but…”

In my experience, very little after that sentence has been entirely free of judgement.

Human beings are wonderfully inconsistent. We value independence while wanting support. We ask for honesty and occasionally resent receiving it. We admire humility while hoping someone notices ours. We tell people not to care what others think, then spend twenty minutes selecting the best photograph to accompany that advice. Perhaps complexity is not a flaw in human character. Perhaps it is the default setting.

The older I get, the less comfortable I become with absolute descriptions of people. A kind person can behave selfishly. A confident person can feel insecure. Someone who values fairness can act unfairly when frightened. An ordinarily patient person can become irritable when overwhelmed. And, most inconveniently, somebody we dislike can occasionally be right.

That last one is particularly offensive to the ego.

We often evaluate behaviour according to how we already feel about the person doing it. Advice from someone we admire becomes wisdom. The same advice from somebody we dislike becomes interference. A mistake made by a friend is complicated; the same mistake made by someone who has annoyed us becomes evidence of their entire personality.

Labels make this easier. Once we have decided that someone is selfish, difficult, irresponsible or unkind, every new action conveniently fits the story. We no longer need to examine what happened because we already know who the character is.

Then life has the irritating habit of introducing contradictory evidence.

The person we considered weak does something remarkably brave. Someone we admired disappoints us. The supposedly selfish friend turns out to have been quietly carrying burdens nobody knew about. Or, perhaps most embarrassing of all, after years of criticising a particular decision, we find ourselves making something remarkably similar.

Life has a peculiar talent for returning our opinions to us with interest.

I once assumed age would make people easier to understand. I imagined that enough experience would eventually produce a reliable catalogue of personalities, motives and predictable outcomes. Instead, the more people I meet, the more aware I become of how much of every life remains hidden. Experience has not always made me a better judge of character. Sometimes it has simply revealed how little information I had when I was judging.

That does not mean we should stop forming opinions. We need judgement to navigate the world. We have to recognise repeated harm, assess behaviour, establish boundaries and decide whom we trust. But perhaps we can become more precise about what we condemn. We can say an action was cruel without deciding the person has never possessed kindness. We can disagree with a decision without assuming it was thoughtless. We can acknowledge that somebody hurt us without claiming complete knowledge of their intentions. We can leave a situation without turning the other person into a villain simply to make our departure easier to explain.

Real people are terribly inconvenient that way. They refuse to remain entirely good or entirely bad for the sake of a cleaner narrative.

I have also become more cautious about the conversations that happen when somebody is not in the room. There is a peculiar satisfaction in sitting around a table agreeing that another person behaved badly. Agreement feels like evidence. Everyone nods, the story becomes more confident with each retelling and before long a complicated human being has been compressed into a very efficient conclusion.

Sometimes reflection arrives only after the tea has gone cold and everyone has gone home.

These days, I try to ask myself a few questions before becoming too certain. What do I actually know? What am I assuming? Would I interpret this differently if someone I loved had done it? Am I judging what happened, or am I judging the character I have built around it? And perhaps the most uncomfortable question of all: would I want my own life evaluated using the same amount of information?

That question reduces my confidence remarkably quickly.

Because somewhere, inevitably, somebody has misunderstood me too. Someone has seen me impatient, distracted, withdrawn or unkind and believed the moment represented the whole person. Someone has heard an incomplete account of something I did. Someone has mistaken silence for indifference or exhaustion for attitude. I have almost certainly been the inconvenient person in another person’s queue.

And perhaps they judged me just as quickly as I judged that woman in the supermarket.

I still think about her occasionally, which is absurd considering the entire incident lasted less than five minutes. I still do not know why paying for those three items was difficult that day. Perhaps she forgot her wallet. Perhaps the card was not working. Perhaps she was distracted by something that had happened that morning. Perhaps she was simply disorganised.

The honest answer is much less interesting than any story I could invent: I do not know.

What I do know is that she apologised, the cashier helped her, the transaction ended and the world continued turning without requiring my assessment of her organisational ability. Yet during those few minutes I had managed to turn a stranger into a character, assign her a flaw and congratulate myself for not possessing it.

I wonder whether, under slightly different circumstances, I might have been the one searching through my bag while somebody behind me checked their watch. Perhaps she would have been kinder than I was. Perhaps she would have sighed. Perhaps she would have thought exactly what I thought.

That is the uncomfortable reversal at the centre of it all. Sometimes the distance between the person we condemn and the person we believe ourselves to be is not morality, intelligence or character. Sometimes it is simply circumstance.

The next time I am standing behind someone who appears to have misplaced their common sense along with their debit card, I cannot promise sainthood. I may still feel irritated. I may still glance at my watch because apparently punctuality has become one of my more unreasonable personality traits. But I hope there will be a fraction of a second between what I see and what I decide it means.

Long enough to remember that I have spent a lifetime discovering how complicated it is to be myself.

It would be rather ambitious to assume I can understand somebody else in fifteen seconds.

Still retiring “I would never” with caution,
Anj