Eye of the Collaborator
When you're alone, you are the reader and you're the writer. And both of these personas can afford to lower the standard further than the last application. You write something, edit it a bit, removing the soul from it in the process, then write again, and down it goes. I think it's a very interesting spiral which happens. The one who folds the bedsheets after waking up can do it lazily, and then one who finds the lazily folded bedsheets at night could further degrade the situation by being okay with the same. And the cycle continues.
My mom finds it easy to cook nicely for the whole family. Sometimes, when the family is fed and only she herself is left to eat, she could reduce her standards and cook hastily, maybe the tortillas are thicker, or maybe she won't eat to the very full. Because the family is well fed anyway, her duty is fulfilled.
I think we're not built to serve ourselves. We truly shine when we're serving others. When we're collaborating with someone, especially when we are aware that an unknown eye can fall witness to what we're doing and choose to join in, we do things differently, properly. Because we know that in this situation, the first impression might be the last. Someone may witness us being our stupid self and hold that image in their minds about us for the rest of their lives.
This, I've found is not impossible to maintain when we're open to being witnessed by others. When we have a collaborator, we have to get off our knees and do what make sense to the eye of the collaborator. The fact that we can do this implies that it is a muscle. I've found that I can put this muscle in operation when I do really need it to. By anticipating a collaborator, a witness, we can look at things from the innocent eyes, and raise our standards above the base we may have allowed them to settled to.