The square in the video is busy in the evening. People walk past under the lights while I speak in the corner of the screen. Before getting into the argument, I explain why I started making these videos: they are messages to myself at fifteen. Things I would have liked to understand earlier.
That is the person I want to reach. And this is the message: you do not become bigger by making somebody else smaller.
The boy on the other side of the camera
Thinking about my younger self gives the conversation a direction. The question becomes what he could use, rather than how impressive I can sound. Can I help him notice a habit before he builds his identity around it? Can I tell him something without pretending I have finished learning it myself?
I have written before about finding my own voice. That earlier video speaks to my sixteen-to-eighteen-year-old self; here I say fifteen. The point is the same: I am trying to put experience into words for someone who has more road ahead of him.
I would want him to measure growth through what he learns, how he treats people and whether he takes responsibility. Someone else’s humiliation does not answer any of those questions.
Where you come from cannot settle your worth
In the clip, I talk about Switzerland and the contradiction of people treated as outsiders turning around and treating other outsiders as inferior. I am angry about that contradiction.
My language also gets sweeping: I suggest that the harshest judges have grown the least, and make a broad claim about who is most racist. The video does not establish either ranking. These are reactions, not findings from a survey. I cannot read somebody’s history, motives or character from a category or a comment.
That limit matters to the message itself. If I object to reducing people to labels, I have to resist doing it to the people I disagree with. I can challenge a discriminatory remark directly without declaring an entire community morally inferior.
Origin tells us something about a person’s background. Conduct gives us something specific to discuss. Growth asks what changes in our own conduct over time. Mixing those things together turns a conversation into a hierarchy.
Leave room for criticism that helps
Someone can disagree with me and have a point. A correction can hurt and still be right. Love does not require us to applaud every decision or soften every standard.
David Yeager and colleagues tested feedback combining demanding standards with assurance that students could meet them. Their three school experiments found benefits for revision and achievement in the studied settings, especially among African American students. These relatively small US studies were about educational trust, not proof of how strangers behave online. Yeager and colleagues, 2014.
The practical distinction I take from that is simple: challenge the work while leaving the person a way forward. “This explanation needs evidence; here is the missing step” gives someone a task. An insult about where they come from gives them a label. Those are illustrative examples, not comments I am attributing to anyone.
My earlier article on handling criticism looks at the receiving end. Here I also want to look at the comment I am about to write.
When the reaction is mine
Toward the end of the video, I ask for a pause when another person gets under our skin. I want to understand what is happening before letting the reaction speak for me.
That does not mean every objection reveals an unhealed wound. Sometimes something bothers us because it is inaccurate, unfair or harmful. Self-examination can sit beside a clear boundary. It does not make the other person’s behaviour our fault.
The pause can hold three questions: what did I actually see or hear? What value or concern is involved? What response would help? That might mean asking a question, correcting a claim, apologising for my own tone or leaving an abusive exchange.
Growth without self-contempt
The same care belongs in the message to my younger self. I can ask him to do better without telling him he is worthless until he does.
In four experiments, Juliana Breines and Serena Chen examined self-compassion after shortcomings or setbacks. They found greater improvement motivation on several measures; one experiment found more time spent studying after failure. That was not a demonstrated long-term transformation, nor a direct improvement in test performance. Breines and Chen, 2012.
I take that as room to hold two thoughts together: I have worth now, and I still have work to do. Neither requires someone else to lose theirs.
That is the message I want to leave with the boy at fifteen. Grow into your life. Leave other people room to grow into theirs.
Sources and notes
-
Original video and thumbnail: Eduard Luta on TikTok, published 6 October 2026; duration 111 seconds. The age, reason for posting and discussion of judgment come from the clip and its caption. No city is inferred from the square.
-
Primary research: Yeager and colleagues, 2014, DOI 10.1037/a0033906; Breines and Chen, 2012, DOI 10.1177/0146167212445599. Research checked 10 October 2026.
-
The diagrams, example feedback and reflection questions are editorial tools, not validated diagnostic tests or measured effects. No calculation or population ranking is claimed.