We need to stop being so judgmental
Checking in on your Judgment
What are some of the ways you’ve judged others recently?
Watching the Real Housewives / Bacherlor(ette) / Kardashians and going off on social, or in your own head, about all the characters you love to hate. He’s such a loser. She’s a terrible person. He doesn’t deserve to have people vying for his attention. She’s so tacky. That family is so dysfunctional. Those parents suck.
Cursing every fifth driver on the road. All these idiots are just making it harder for all the small handful of competent drivers, like me. These assholes don’t care about anyone but themselves and saving an extra two minutes.
Silently fuming and barely restraining yourself as that friend or coworker tells you about yet another questionable decision she is making, which though it won’t impact you, you just know is going to end badly. She’s so dumb or ridiculous. She’s childish and dumb and deserves the disaster she gets.
Furiously commenting a mini-tirade every time someone brings up a popular book or author you hate. This hack of a writer convinced millions of people to buy her book, and made millions of dollars from it, even though her characters are flat as the page they’re printed on and the plot is so overdone, and the romance isn’t really romantic at all. Not to mention it started as FANFICTION of ANOTHER AWFUL book.
I have judged this way, and beyond, at times. And I know I’m not alone.
We all do it. And our media — social and otherwise — invites and compels us to do even more of it. We’re overstimulated and overwhelmed with opportunities to judge others every chance we get. And, because of how we’re wired, we often give in. For a few seconds, a few minutes, until it becomes so pervasive that it starts amounting to too much time out of our days, too much energy.
It gives us a good feeling, at first. A sense of rightness, then righteousness. A sense of safety.
We know the right path or decision or choice or way to behave, so we’re not going to get caught with our asses hanging out. As long as we’re judging, we can’t be judged. We’re doing the right things, we are acceptable. We won’t be ostracized.
Does judging others make us bad people?
Nope! One tendency, out of dozens or hundreds of things we do every day, doesn’t define our entire personality or being. And it certainly doesn’t define our worthiness or value. It’s nowhere near enough information.
Also, “good person” and “bad person” are, in most cases, really flat, unnuanced ways of assessing a whole human being.
“And therein lies the issue. And therein lies the problem.” — Alanis Morrisette
Is judgment inherently bad?
No. Judging isn’t inherently bad, either.
In many ways, humans are wired to judge, from the time we started setting up communities and societies. Judgment is often tied to fear, which is one of our core survival emotions. Our ancestors had to figure out what behaviors and which community members were safe, unsafe, acceptable and not, to the greater community, and to individuals within it.
So we started judging more and more heavily. We saw judging others as insulation from being judged ourselves, and in many ways still do. We get to be the “good one” by pointing out and ostracizing the “bad ones”.
And we turned that judgment inward, causing ourselves all sorts of suffering over it, and keeping ourselves from what we’re meant to do.
Judging may not be bad, or make us bad people, but it is harmful and detrimental
While judging is not intrinsically bad or wrong, it hurts and limits us when we get into a pattern or habit of doing it too much, too often. It especially holds us back in areas like writing, relationships, and even our own personal growth.
Here’s what judgment does:
Judging disconnects us from others. We can’t be in a space of judgment AND a space of connection with another person at the same time. To judge is to push away, to put up barriers.
Judging chokes empathy and compassion. Judgment also butts heads with empathy and compassion, and often wins. Having empathy or compassion for another person means we’re connecting with their experience and their pain or struggle. When we judge them, we’re shutting down our compassion and empathy for them.
Judgment feeds our harsh inner critic. The more we get used to judging others, the more we start to turn that on ourselves. We’re already our own worst critics in a lot of instances, and feeding the judgment feeds the critic.
Frequent judging limits creativity. Creativity thrives in mindsets of openness, expansiveness, curiosity. It doesn’t do well when it meets judgment. Creativity asks questions, considers possibilities. Judgment is rigid and narrow.
Judgment oversimplifies. It not only lacks nuance, it refuses to acknowledge there is any nuance to situations, actions, or human beings.
Judging contributes to unhappiness. Our minds aren’t happy when they’re in a state of judgment. They’re, at the very least, a little dissatisfied. And the more we feed it, the longer we stay in those mental spaces.
Judgment wastes time and energy. Time spent spinning the judgment hamster wheel is time NOT spent writing, creating, connecting. And it’s draining!
Being overly judgy puts us in opposition to who we need to be as writers.
All these drawbacks of judgment directly impact us as writers (and humans) and make our work so much harder than it has to be.
We NEED empathy, connection, and creativity to write well. We need to be able to see ourselves and other humans as whole, layered beings, to create complex and believable characters.
(And yes, even memoirists and other personal narrative writers create characters, because they choose what about a real person goes in or stays out of the stories they tell about their lives.)
Our readers see our characters through our lens, always, and heavy judgment fogs up that lens.
We risk flattening the fullness of what and whom we write about when we judge. We moralize, we show only narrow views of people and situations. We may paint others as wholly evil, ourselves as wholly innocent victims of others’ evil. We risk reducing people to only one aspect of who they are, ourselves included.
When we judge, we miss opportunities to portray our nuanced relationships and situations.
To be authentic in our memoirs, to tell our truth, we have to come in with openness and curiosity. We can’t do that if we’re sitting in judgment of ourselves or others the entire time we’re writing about our experiences.
We’ve all done things we’re not proud of and acted in ways that we wouldn’t repeat. We need to be able to connect with the parts of ourselves who did those things, with who we were at that time nonjudgmentally, so when we tell our story it gives the reader a well-rounded understanding of us beyond that terrible decision we made.
Judging cramps our style as writers, removes us from our stories, and often repels readers.
The good news is that we don’t have to keep spinning out and snowballing into judgment. We can start to move away from it, to replace it with more positive, fertile, and open mindsets and ways of being in and with the world.
It just takes a little mindfulness, a little journaling, and a lot of self-kindness.
