“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
I read this somewhere and it stuck with me because it’s true in a way that feels obvious until you actually try to live by it, and even then it’s hard. We all have advantages we never asked for and rarely notice – the kind of things that just make life slightly easier, like being born into a family that didn’t struggle to put food on the table, or having parents who went to university and could help you with homework without feeling lost themselves, or arriving in a country where you speak the language and look like most of the people around you. None of these things were earned. They just happened. And they add up in ways that are impossible to quantify but impossible to ignore.
The problem is that we tend to forget this about other people. When someone is struggling, or making what we see as poor choices, or not getting ahead the way we have, our first instinct is rarely to consider that maybe their starting line was fifty metres further back. It’s easier to assume they simply didn’t try hard enough, or that they have some character flaw we would never possess. We project our own experience onto everyone else and then judge them for not matching it.
This isn’t about letting people off the hook or pretending that effort doesn’t matter. It’s about recognising that effort means something different when you’re carrying weights you didn’t choose. The same amount of determination produces very different results depending on what terrain you’re running on.
I catch myself doing this all the time. Seeing someone fail and thinking they should have done better, forgetting entirely that I’ve had opportunities handed to me on a plate that they never even knew existed. The quote isn’t asking you to stop holding people accountable. It’s asking you to pause for half a second and consider the full picture before you pass judgement, because the full picture almost always includes things you can’t see.