Adult children make mistakes, too

There’s a lot of blame and guilt in many people’s lives. We often think of people in terms of good or bad, and feel unworthy or miserable if we fail at things we think we should be able to do. When we don’t do quite as well as we could, because we’re tired or unwell or distracted, we blame and belittle ourselves.

Let’s take a different approach.

Think of a young child, maybe three years old. He has come a long way from a newborn, but he’s still not that far along. If he tries his hand at making a drawing, and it’s not quite up to adult standards, we don’t think of him as being any worse for that. Or if he doesn’t quite want to share his toys or gets frustrated with his sibling, we understand that it’s because he’s still young, and hasn’t yet learned all the people skills. We don’t judge him for that, but just gently teach him what we’d like him to do instead.

It’s not that he’s good or bad, it’s just that he lacks the skills and practice. At the same time, we see the vast potential in him, all the way that he has already come and the way he’s learning new things every day.

Now, look at yourself from the perspective of some immensely wise, benevolent being. If you’re religious, that being could be God. If you have a transhumanist bent, maybe a superintelligent AI with understanding beyond human comprehension. Or you could imagine a vastly older version of you, one that had lived for thousands of years and seen and done things you couldn’t even imagine.

From the perspective of such a being, aren’t you – and all those around you – the equivalent of that three-year-old? Someone who’s inevitably going to make mistakes and be imperfect, because the world is such a complicated place and nobody could have mastered it all? But who’s nevertheless come a long way from what they once were, and are only going to continue growing?

Nate Soares has said that he feels more empathy towards people when he thinks of them as “monkeys who struggle to convince themselves that they’re comfortable in a strange civilization, so different from the ancestral savanna where their minds were forged”. Similarly, we could think of ourselves as young children outside their homes, in a world that’s much too complicated and vast for us to ever understand more than a small fraction of it, still making a valiant effort to do our best despite often being tired or afraid.

Let’s take this attitude, not just towards others, but ourselves as well. We’re doing our best to learn to do the right things in a big, difficult world. If we don’t always succeed, there’s no blame: just a knowledge that we can learn to do better, if we make the effort.