Ask Polly: Why Are Other People Always Messing Up?

Dear Polly,

One of my New Year's resolutions was to be a more compassionate person, and I would appreciate your help. I have always had a strong moral compass. It's one of my favorite things about me. I like feeling that I'm, if not improving, at least not actively making the world a worse place. I like having a sense of wrong and right, without a need to constantly make exemptions for my own actions. I feel like a good person on average, and that gives me strength and a feeling of grounded-ness if not happiness. I feel guilty easily, and doing bad things often just isn't worth the ensuing waves of shame and self-hatred. Observing cycles of messing up, regretting it, and doing it all over again in my friends just strengthens this conviction. Lest you think I'm moralizing people's tastes in books or their right to birth control, I should clarify up front that my compass operates largely on the axis of "actions that hurt other people–actions that do not."