If you’re someone who struggled to fit in as a child—someone for whom social interaction didn’t come naturally—loyal friendship probably became a trait you value highly in others. When so many people inexplicably didn’t like you or appeared to be friends only to cut you off or change their tune later, those who did resolutely stand by you and treated you well whatever else was going on were like heroes in your world. And those who teased, bullied, or disparaged you were like villains.

When we form these kinds of mental frameworks as children, it’s hard to even realize that we’re still using them as adults, much less change them. They seem as much a natural part of the way we perceive reality as the way different foods taste or how we interpret facial expressions.

If I look back on my life as objectively as I can, I see that people started treating me much better in my late teens and early twenties, as both they and I matured. I struggled (and still struggle today) to fit in outside of certain social circles, but I haven’t been bullied or unfairly treated by any significant number of people since I was about fifteen. Yet I didn’t shake the mental coping mechanism—viewing others in terms of villains who rejected me and heroes who stuck by me—I’d developed when I was younger. My framework never caught up to the new reality.

What did change is that I discovered the moral code I now endeavor to live by—the principles of Objectivism—which gave me the means to objectively evaluate mine and others’ behavior. I became aware of the ways in which I had behaved unjustly in my younger years and internally forgave certain people who, I could now see, had reasonably responded to me and whom I had previously regarded as villains.

But I still retained my childhood framework as a subconscious element of how I evaluated others, alongside the more deliberate judgments I was now making. This retention had two major effects:

1. Even when I accepted that someone had a legitimate reason for rejecting, disliking, or criticizing me, I still held as an implicit premise that he or she should have given me more chances, handled things more kindly, or been prepared to forgive me in the future. I regarded treating me poorly as inherently bad. Even when I could see a just case for someone’s treatment of me, I still felt wronged and wanted the other person’s decision to change.

2. I was almost completely uncritical of people who were kind and loyal to me. I took that kindness and loyalty as self-evident proof of the other person’s good character, as though no person who esteemed me highly could possibly be a bad person.

Recently, as I’ve undergone a huge amount of introspection and therapy, I’ve realized the scale and severity of these errors. A key part of self-esteem is knowing that one judges fairly, and so the realization that I was (at least partly) using a subjective standard to evaluate others has forced me to reexamine my premises and all the judgments that have followed them—in other words, reevaluate my judgments of all my friends and the supposed villains in my life.

This has led me to adjust some friendships, but more significantly, it’s led me to forgive a large number of people—including some I had been angry with very recently. This has had an unexpectedly liberating effect on my happiness and my sense of self-respect.

It’s easy to go too far when making a realization like this and start forgiving those who actually did act unjustly. So I’ve also formulated precise criteria for when I should forgive people who have actually wronged me. My new explicit standard for forgiveness is:

• If the other person was acting justly in response to my actions, that person deserves no negative judgment and has no obligation to treat me differently in the future, no matter how I behave going forward. It may still be that the other person decides that I have earned better treatment in future, but he or she is not morally obliged to do so.

• If the other person treated me unjustly but reasonably believed he or she was behaving rightly at the time—or acted because of understandable context such as severe trauma or coercion from others—I should forgive that person only when he or she honestly acknowledges those actions and all the relevant errors and/or reasons that gave rise to those actions.

• If the other person willfully treated me unjustly, I should only consider forgiveness when I see substantial evidence of character transformation, including in all cases an explicit admission of the wrongdoing in detail. Even when this occurs, I am not obliged to spend time evaluating this evidence, and should only do so when it will help me live a better life and achieve my values.

If you adopt a similar framework, consider that there will be cases that transcend these three categories, such as someone who overreacted to a bad thing you did, or who was in some respects willfully malicious but also honestly misguided in other respects. In these cases, in order to evaluate objectively, it’s necessary to parse these elements and deal with both (or all three) aspects of the person’s actions. Dealing with the more severe element on its own will not be enough. For both of you to objectively judge each other, yourselves, and the future form of your relationship, you need to deal with every element of your previous hostility.

Lastly, it’s also important that we apply the same framework to ourselves, working through each of the three categories in turn. Firstly, learning to forgive myself for things I used to judge myself for but that were not actually morally judgeworthy—such as having been a weird, awkward child—was a key part of improving my self-esteem last year.1 Then came the process of being objective about the things I had done wrong. Letting ourselves off the hook for our wrongdoings prematurely and hating ourselves indefinitely for them are both ruinous for our self-esteem and ability to live. Rather, the only proper approach is to rigorously demand from ourselves evidence of real change and of objectivity about what we did. Once we know that we’ve done this and are living virtuously to the best of our knowledge—and that requires extensive, honest introspection—then we can look upon ourselves as fundamentally good and forgive the past wrongdoings.2

It may take more or less time to forgive yourself than it takes others to forgive you. We know ourselves better than others do, so we have a better grasp of our own honesty regarding our admissions and changes, but we also have a more complete idea of how much we did wrong and need to address. It’s important not to let others’ judgments significantly influence our self-judgment. A good or bad evaluation by a person we believe to be objective can be evidence that we have demonstrated good or bad character, but only by corroborating or directing your attention to the evidence of our own actions and self-awareness. Ultimately, only you have the necessary context to fully and objectively judge yourself.

In the past nine months or so, I’ve cut down the number of people I think have seriously treated me unjustly (as adults) from several dozen to only a few—and they are all people I’m open to forgiving in the future if they provide the right evidence of taking ownership and fundamentally changing.3 Even if the people I’ve forgiven never know it, doing so has taken a huge weight off my mind and left me feeling much freer to love myself and my life.

For many years, thinking deeply about my values and the big decisions I’ve faced has added huge value to my life. Knowing why I enjoy my interests and hobbies has helped me get more satisfaction from them, and understanding how a big decision such as accepting a job or beginning a project affects and relates to my deepest values has helped ensure those …

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Have you ever invested heavily in what you thought was a deep, important friendship—only to discover that the other person never really valued you on anything close to the same level?

I’ve been there, and it’s a horrible feeling. In the couple of years before COVID, I had a friend who became a major part of my life. We spent multiple evenings each week a…

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When I promote the idea of making life decisions—including about what relationships to maintain and invest in—according to a hierarchy of rational values, one of the most common objections I hear is that it's heartless or unkind to judge the people in your life in terms of their value to you. The idea of evaluating relationships rationally sounds cold a…

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Influential figures from Gandhi to the Dalai Lama have advocated practicing “unconditional love,” claiming that we should love others without expecting anything in return. Sometimes, people interpret this idea as meaning that we should “love” a particular person (such as a family member) without regard for his or her flaws, value to us, or behavior. Oth…

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Issue no. 4, 18 April 2024

Welcome to the Reason for Living newsletter!

In this issue:

• Feature Article: Can You Treat Love Like a Business Deal? 

• Book Review: The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Calson

• Recently Posted: Accepting that Your Brain’s Not Broken

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