Let’s travel back to the 5th century BCE to ancient Greece. The cultural ideal for a man was to be fit, athletic, handsome, well educated, and scholarly. How would that make you feel if you were a short pudgy man with a huge nose and homely face who looked silly in a toga and who couldn’t outrun a tortoise? Let’s travel to our time and look at the cultural ideal for Euro-American women. You must be thin and beautiful; have smooth shiny facial skin; be surgically enhanced with lip filler, breast implants, Botox for the forehead, and sculpted eyebrows. What if due to genetics your body won’t comply? What if you don’t want or can’t afford to poke, push, and prod your body into cosmetic perfection? What is it like to be a LGBTQ person and have other people react to you with revulsion, condemnation, and hate; to have politicians scapegoat you as the centerpiece of their campaigns; and have punitive laws passed that restrict what you can do with your own body? What is it like to want or need an abortion in states where crowds of angry people get in your face, scream at you, spit at you, and threaten you with damnation and death? There are many cultural ideals about how people should look, be, and act that can make us feel awful about ourselves. What many of these ideals have in common is their effect, intended or not, of excluding others, making them feel inferior, and violating their dignity. These ideals may seem innocent and reasonable on the surface, but they can cause psychological pain when applied. Let’s take the ideal of marrying, buying a home, having normal kids, and earning substantial income by your mid-30s. These days housing prices and mortgage rates are sky high. Kids don’t always turn out right. There are loads of kids with autism, Trisomy 21, ADHD, dyslexia, seizures, tics, and various intellectual and behavioral problems. How about all the obstacles to getting a high-paying job such as growing up amidst poverty, violence, a broken home, and mass incarceration; being stigmatized due mental illness or addiction; or facing hostile discrimination on the basis of race, religion, ethnicity, and refugee/immigration status. How are people with these challenges supposed to feel about themselves? Life is challenging and stressful. It’s hard enough in your own head when you don’t measure up, but still worse when others use invidious comparisons, sarcasm or scorn to make you feel as low as it gets. Shocking as it may be there are published instances of so-called citizens shooting, burning, urinating on, and turning a hose on homeless people. Is there a solution to the problem of cultural ideas of success oppressing people and wounding their dignity. There is no one obvious solution. However, self-compassion and compassion for others would help. Being non-judgmental, respectful, and caring to people who struggle would certainly be better than treating them as inferior. Seeing others as comrades not competitors would help. So would increased willingness to genuinely accept others as they are without having to fit a specific, cultural mold. A starting place for change would be mindfulness – pausing when automatic, reflexive judgments of human worth pop up, taking a breath, and remembering the old phrase “there but for the grace of God.”