If I were you...

Taken literally, “if I were you” seems to be an entirely redundant turn of phrase. And yet we hear it a lot.

“If I were you, I would have turned left at that last junction.”

“If I were you, I wouldn’t have called my boss a bitch.”

“If I were you, I wouldn’t take that job.”

Often, the phrase is simply a convenient way to offer advice. We aren’t really thinking about what we would do if we were someone else; we are advising someone on what we think they should do or should have done. Or perhaps we’re just chatting about what we would do if we were in similar circumstances. Either way, there’s no problem.

But taking the phrase literally does offer us a very important tool for being more understanding, compassionate and forgiving towards other people in general. Take a moment to consider what you would actually have done if you were somebody else in some scenario or another.

Hopefully, after a little thought you’ll come to the somewhat unintuitive but ultimately inescapable conclusion that you would have done precisely what they did, whatever that was. Why? Because you were them. There is no getting around this simple but powerful fact. If you were in someone else’s shoes entirely – body, mind, soul (if you believe in such a thing), memories, environmental influences and more – there would be no extra part of you to make you do differently to them, and so you would do precisely what they did. Hitler, Stalin, Genghis Khan, Adam Lanza, George Bush, your mother-in-law, the guy that knocked you off your bike last year… everyone. If you were them, you would have done what they did.

But so what? How does this change anything? It may, but it may not. That depends on your current view of the world. But please do me a favour and try something: whenever someone annoys you or upsets you or otherwise does something you see as worthy of punishment or suffering, just remember this fact: if you were them, you would have done the same. You might not like it, but it is simple truth, and I wager it will make you see some things very differently.

And don’t stop there. Think about this the next time someone is talking about the justice system, too. How do we justify revenge (or retributive justice, as the more “civilised” among us like to call it)? With difficulty, I think. How can we condone punishment for its own sake whilst simultaneously admitting that we’d have done the same as the perpetrator if we were them? This thought experiment supports the ever-more-popular view that the purpose of the justice system should be protection of the public and prevention of reoffending. So do think about it, please.