It's always interesting to note when someone goes from making grounded observations to judging themselves. Perhaps you have seen such a shift in tone in yourself, when you go from "Hmm, I have spent 6 hours on the internet today" to "Why do I always waste so much time?". There is a sense of what is wrong with me which is in the second comment, which you don't pick up from earnest observations.
In general, I think it's important to distinguish between observations, desires, and judgements. Observation is about what is, desire is about what you want, judgement is when what you want isn't in tune with what is. Typically, it's good to let go of judgements, because they prevent us from seeing what is happening, but the loopy thing to notice is that it is possible to judge yourself for judging yourself, in which case, it might be best to notice that it is happening and zoom back.
Because ultimately, judging involves a fair amount of attention collapse. When someone feels ashamed for instance, they end up only looking at themselves. It's about what they did, how they feel, how this relates with other things in the past, but all of this prevents them from looking at the entire situation so that they can understand the context of their behavior, how their environment influenced them, and what they could do better.
Shame can be useful to the extent that it helps correct behavior, because people who are utterly shameless honestly feel somewhat sociopathic to me, but most of the time from what I can tell, shame utterly paralyzes people into an incredibly narrow form of self-obsessed analysis.
It's interesting to think about how much our culture imprints this onto us, because shame has a very important obscuring mechanism at its core. Because it focuses all of your attention on you and your shortcomings, it makes you poor at examining the problems in your environment and culture, which means that a toxic society which ends up installing various shame-laden beliefs in its people can get away with it. Perhaps this is how civilization maintains their stability, by keeping people small and growing a superego which people become subservient too.
But generalities aside, I think it's very clear that many people grow in an environment which heavily pushes towards shame. All shortcomings of our system are pushed onto individuals, and if someone can't knuckle down and "just do productive things", they are blamed and told to exert more willpower.
The reason why I said that it's typically good to let go of judgements is because in my experience, they rarely help solve practical problems, on top of creating distance from those around us. There's an implicit false dichotomy with those who hold onto their shame, which tells them that if they stopped feeling ashamed for not doing better, they would fall down to some level of mediocrity. This is likely a key aspect of what keeps shame in people's lives, another mechanism which makes itself difficult to see, and my takeaway is that this whole dynamic does not work. If you want good results in life, you want to make clear-headed and precise observations, not judgements.
The classic example is with procrastination, and there are so many people who have given their opinion as to what causes it that I think I will sidestep the mountain of generic advice by simply talking about my own experience. A really obvious aspect that I can see about myself, now that I am outside of school, is that I was never allowed to work on things I was genuinely interested in, at the rhythm I wanted. There was always an external expectation which I had to meet and contort myself into, and the justification thrown around, of course, is that if those structures didn't exist, children would be totally lazy and have their attention sucked by social media, video games, and other distractions.
There is some truth to that, but this is one of the many cases where a problem is justified because it is part of a network of other problematic structures, and the whole is never seen for what it is. I have to stop writing at some point so I will not get in that territory, but all this to say that the education system solves problems which have been created by other facets of society.
Circling back to my first observation, it's difficult to work on a project if I wasn't even the one who initiated it, and was forced to do it for some class which I probably wasn't interested in either. How can we expect people to trust themselves if the education system doesn't trust them? One of the most jarring things I experienced as a young adult was how strangers would talk to me like a real human being, something which teachers really did because they assumed the worst out of young students. I know that out of those strangers, many of them were paid to be cordial, but then again so do teachers, but I never felt safe being myself in school, it was always assumed that if they didn't put a leash around you, you were going to be irresponsible. Terrible, terrible implicit message for someone's relationship with themselves.
The poison of inner conflict is quite deep because it makes people doubt all of their decisions, and even their observations. It feels like trying to meet the demand of someone whom you cannot even trust, except that that part is within you. I must say that I have been lucky enough to not run into that much inner conflict, and I am not sure why. I think one aspect of it is that I have always had a sort of deep arrogance in me, the sense that I could figure things out if I really cared about doing it, which was reflected in my good grades at school. I felt like I was intelligent enough to do things even if I didn't care, which meant that if I did, oh boy I could do things! In practice it wasn't as simple, because as it turns out, caring about something isn't automatic, and also, life isn't just about intelligence, it's also about consistency, relationships, developing good habits, and so much more. But I was lucky enough to not feel like I had to constantly fight myself to do things constantly, thankfully.
Another major aspect of my procrastination problem is that I didn't even have the idea of "project management" as a skill. The idea that it was a specific thing, being able to get things done, which you could break down into subskills and focus on one at a time to get better at, wasn't obvious to me. It felt more like I was trying to do something difficult, like "write essay", and if I couldn't do it, then I was lazy and I just needed to "try harder", whatever that meant. The idea that you could make observations about what is going on, break down the tasks, write specific actions to perform and do a check up on your emotional state was completely alien to me. It's a bit like if you told children to "play basketball", and if they didn't do it well, you blamed the fact that they didn't "try harder", instead of realizing that they never practiced various subskills such as dribbling, passing and shooting. This is what the game of judging looks like at a macro level, which is probably why so many people are bad at getting things done. Teachers are too budy judging students instead of giving instructions.
And to be fair, I can't exactly blame teachers, who are part of a system which does not provide them the incentives to spend time on each student. I suspect that most people lack someone who knows what they are doing and who is willing to listen closely to them, because the education system has never provided that for them, and most parents are too busy telling their children what to do to be able to listen to them. Within the current model of school, one which from what I understand is basically modelled after the factory, the idea of having a conversation with a single student at a time and giving them what's needed to unblock them sounds ridiculous, yet it is basically the only way I know of that teaching can be effective. But obviously, there aren't enough teachers for that, and especially good teachers who care about what they do. It's a very deep systemic problem.
So what I see from this is that the self-rejection of society and its structures ends up being internalized by people, who end up judging themselves for everything. And I think that the astounding gaps between the best students and the worst is mainly due to a feedback loop of self-confidence, clear questions and observations, and people being willing to listen to you. As someone who had good grades, I was confident in myself and I felt safe asking questions during classes, something which I believe wasn't the case for the vast majority of students. They simply felt too dumb to ask about what they didn't understand. This then compounded with the fact that they didn't care, in a feedback loop once again, because the two reinforce one another: if you don't care about a subject, you won't put in the time and you will be lost, which means it's unlikely you will care about it, on and on. And because I had good grades, teachers took my questions seriously, which again I don't think was always the case for the other students.
All this to say that attention and skill have a way of compounding, which is one of the many reasons why I think the rich get richer. 1
So the two main factors I have highlighted with my procrastination were 1) I didn't feel trusted and I wasn't working on things I cared about, and 2) I didn't treat project management as a skill, with subskills I could improve at. Honestly there is a lot more to say, but I feel like I sort of deviated from my initial topic, which was the importance of making observations instead of judging myself, so let me give a concrete example I am going through right now.
I would like to go back to my comic, Zenith Finding, and make progress on it. I haven't done so, why is that? Clearly there are reasons, because it's a story I constantly find myself thinking about, I care about it, and I have spent enough time on it to make two small chapters. It's not much, but it's also not insignificant, yet I haven't been able to consistently work on it. Here are my observations:
These are my observations, and I doubt that they are useful for most people, but this process was at least very illustrative for myself. In the past I would simply feel bad about doing what I felt like I was "supposed" to do, but now that I have more freedom in my life, I can pick the things I want to do, and try to understand why I am not doing them.
I used to have a rather harsh inner critique, so harsh in fact that I would voice it out loud, because I couldn't contain the thoughts all in my head. I would be mumbling like "wow how could I do this" or "how did I not notice that ... really?" and I wonder if the people around me were creeped out by that. For some reason, I do not have that voice in me anymore, and I am not sure why. It might be the combination of meditation and journaling I have done in my life, even though for the former I was and still am rather unfocused and inconsistent, and for the latter I would be mostly talking on and on about the same problems, whining and feeling helpless and not really doing anything differently.
I think it's fundamentally very difficult to communicate to someone who is stuck in deep shame how to let go of that, because they inhabit such a different mindspace than the one I am currently working on. This is probably why having people who can listen to you, and being able to do that for yourself, is so crucial, but of course some people have never had access to it, to the point that they do not even know that it is lacking in their life since they've never been exposed to it. But all I can say is that it is always possible to start with baby steps. Just making random observations builds up the muscle of observing, to the point that it can become a key skill that one could rely on, such that most of your thoughts end up converging towards attempts to understand what is going on, instead of the need to judge yourself for your shortcomings.
1 No doubt that there is some malevolence involved too, i.e. rich people actively doing things to stay rich, but I don't think we have to reach for such factors to see the phenomenon of rich getting richer arising. I beleive it's mainly network effects and finite resources being pulled to the same people again and again because you know what to expect of them.
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Narrowawareness Observation Trust Productivity Blindness
2025-08-04