Life has a brutal habit of forcing us to confront our own hypocrisy

By David McElroy · February 1, 2026

I was feeling pretty self-righteous. Someone had just informed me that he was breaking a contract he had signed. It made me angry, because it was going to embarrass me with other people involved in the deal.

Even worse — from my point of view — is that it was going to cost me thousands of dollars. I had worked to bring about this agreement and now one of the parties was walking away from what he had firmly agreed to do.

“Why would someone agree to do something and then suddenly announce he wasn’t going to keep his word?” I complained to myself.

For a few hours, I burned with self-righteous anger. I was a victim. This other person was terrible. I would never do something like this.

And then it hit me. I really would do something like this. In fact, I had already done something far worse about 15 years ago. I was forced to confront my ridiculous double-standards.

I was being a hypocrite. Again.

About 15 years ago, I had agreed to marry a beautiful and brilliant woman. We had talked about it off and on for quite some time before we set a date and made firm plans. We announced it to everyone and set a lot of things in motion.

A month before the wedding, I got cold feet. Nothing had changed about her or about our relationship. I was just concerned about some things about her. Was I making the right decision?

I got worried enough about my own decision that I told her I was backing out. She was hurt. She was humiliated, because she suddenly had to tell all of her friends and family that her fiancé decided not to marry her.

I had no good reason. I just backed out — despite having happily agreed beforehand — and I left her to deal with the embarrassment and the emotional fallout.

I eventually regretted that decision — months later — but by the time I realized I had made a mistake, it was too late and she had moved on.

This story isn’t really about that woman or that relationship. That love has been dead for many years. No, the story is about my hypocrisy. I was willing to judge someone — condemn someone — for backing out of an agreement. And I’ve done the same. In fact, I’ve probably done worse things.

When I look at the current situation — about the contract someone is breaking — I can actually see why the man is doing it. Maybe he never should have agreed to this. I can see that it might have been a mistake for him. Yes, I wish he had realized that before he signed a contract and put me in a poor position, but I can’t really blame him for not being perfect.

Being angry at other people is easy. Feeling self-righteous judgment is even easier. And it can feel good to marinate in that anger when we feel slighted or when things don’t go as we want them to.

But this judgment of others doesn’t do any good, for us or for them. What’s worse is that we are often hypocrites in our judgment. I certainly was in this case.

I’m a hypocrite all the time, in little ways and big ways. You almost certainly are, too. It doesn’t reflect well on us, but if we can look honestly at ourselves — at our tendency to judge others and excuse ourselves — we can become more decent human beings.

Life presents us such lessons all the time. Most of us choose to ignore what life is trying to teach us, so we stay mired in anger and hypocrisy and self-righteousness. Those feelings aren’t very healthy for us and they’re not very loving for us to feel toward others.

I still don’t like being put in a bad position with the current contract. But I also know I don’t get to claim moral superiority. I’ve done the same thing — and I’ve hurt people, too.

Life didn’t reveal my hypocrisy to shame me. It did it to remind me of something. If I want grace for my own failures, I have to be willing to offer it to others.

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