Julian Publication
What Feels Obvious to Us
How the things we consider normal can quietly become the standard we use to judge everyone else.
Prefer listening? Listen to the podcast episode here.
Lately, I’ve noticed myself being more judgmental.
Not in the sense that I was acting on it—the judgment would just show up.
Someone would do something differently from how I would do it, and I’d immediately have a reaction:
Why would they do that?
That doesn’t make sense.
Why don’t they just say what they mean?
It felt obvious to me. And that’s what caught my attention.
Why did it feel so obvious?
What We Know Feels Normal
We all grow up learning what normal looks like.
We learn it from our families, our friends, our schools, our workplaces, and the places we live.
How people communicate.
How they disagree.
How they show affection.
How they handle problems.
What they consider rude.
What they consider responsible.
Most of the time, we don’t consciously decide any of this. We just experience it.
Eventually, what we’re used to becomes what feels normal. And once something feels normal, it’s easy to forget that we learned it somewhere.
A Small Example
Direct communication is one I’ve had to notice in myself.
I’ve spent a lot of my life in environments where being direct was normal. Say what you mean. Be clear. Solve the problem. Don’t make people guess.
So when I encountered people who communicated differently, I didn’t always see it as a different way of communicating.
Sometimes I saw it as strange. Sometimes frustrating. Sometimes I wondered why they couldn’t just say what they meant.
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized:
They weren’t necessarily doing something wrong. They were doing something that made sense to them.
It just didn’t make sense to me. And those are two very different things.
The Comparison We Don’t Notice
I think this is where a lot of judgment comes from. We compare other people to ourselves without realizing we’re doing it.
Someone is quieter than we are.
Someone communicates indirectly.
Someone doesn’t care about the things we care about.
Someone makes decisions differently.
Because we’re using our own experience as the reference point, the difference can feel like a problem.
They’re too quiet. They’re too emotional. They’re too passive. They’re too rigid. They’re too ambitious. They’re not ambitious enough.
Sometimes those judgments will be accurate. But sometimes we’re simply looking at something unfamiliar and calling it wrong.
The difficult part is that we usually don’t experience this as comparison. We experience it as observation.
What Changed for Me
I’ve started asking a different question when something about another person doesn’t make sense to me:
“What am I comparing this against?”
Sometimes the answer is my values. Sometimes it’s my experiences. Sometimes it’s simply what I’ve become accustomed to.
That doesn’t mean I have to abandon my standards. It doesn’t mean every behavior is acceptable. It doesn’t even mean my way is wrong.
It just gives me another possibility:
Maybe what feels obvious to me isn’t obvious to them. And maybe what feels obvious to them wouldn’t be obvious to me.
That seems simple enough. But I think I’ve spent a long time underestimating how much of our judgment comes from forgetting that difference exists.
It’s Still My Perspective
I don’t think the goal is to stop having opinions.
We need standards. We need preferences. We need to decide what works for us.
The goal, at least for me, is remembering where those standards came from. Because the things that feel most obvious are often the things we question the least.
We ask: “Why would anyone do that?”
Maybe sometimes the better question is: “Why does my way feel so obvious to me?”
That doesn’t give us the answer. But it gives us somewhere else to look.
And sometimes, that’s enough to turn judgment into curiosity.