Are We Turning Life into a Moral Competition? Are we projecting our reality onto other peoples lives?

I love being woke. I’ve been woke since I started reading.

From a young age, I could recognize dysfunction. Maybe that’s a sign of neurodivergence, maybe it’s just curiosity sharpened early, I’m not attached to the label. What mattered was that reading opened my eyes to something simple and profound: everyone lives a different version of the same life.

We are all human, yet endlessly different. Different homes, different wounds, different starting points and still, so much familiarity. The same emotions. The same desires. The same mistakes repeating themselves in new costumes.

Good and bad coexisted without needing justification. life felt balanced. There was space to be human.

You could fail publicly. You could be lost for years. You could be an alcoholic at 30 and rebuild your life at 40. People understood that growth was nonlinear. That mistakes weren’t a moral verdict, just part of the process. We held space for each other to live, to mess up, to learn, to mess up again, and to grow.

Everyone’s story was different, yet strangely familiar.

And then I grew up.

I don’t know exactly when things changed or maybe I changed, maybe things have always been like this and I was just young but somewhere along the way, people stopped holding space. Morality became performative. Accountability turned into spectacle. Mistakes stopped being human and started being treated as a permanent stain on your worth.

Now, one wrong move doesn’t mean you need to learn it means you need to be punished. Shunned. Cut off. Exiled. Left to figure it out alone.

And before it’s misunderstood: I’m not arguing against accountability. Harm should be named. Patterns should be confronted. Growth should be demanded.

What I’m questioning is when accountability ceased to be constructive and became indistinguishable from dehumanization.

When did we start projecting our own healing timelines, values, and moral frameworks onto other people’s lives and calling it justice?

We’ve turned survival into a competition. Trauma into a hierarchy. Healing into a performance. Whoever heals faster, speaks better, knows the right language, and makes the "correct" choices gets to be seen as worthy.

Everyone else? They’re written off as careless, broken, or beyond redemption.

But life isn’t lived in theory, it’s lived in context.

Not everyone has the same life. Not everyone has the same safety net. Not everyone wakes up with the same nervous system, the same resources, the same clarity. Expecting identical outcomes from unequal circumstances isn’t morality it’s convenience.

We’ve confused being right with being righteous.

Holding space doesn’t mean excusing harm. It means recognizing that people are more than their worst moment. It means allowing room for transformation especially when it’s messy, slow, and uncomfortable to witness.

If we truly believe people can change, then we have to stop treating mistakes as a final sentence.

Otherwise, we’re not building a more ethical world.

We’re just turning humanity into a moral competition and calling it progress.