Judging

You are so judgmental.

If you mutter the words “Not me,” you simply fall into the majority of people who don’t admit to doing the very things of which they accuse others.

There are certain fundamental characteristics that are a part of every human being. While I don’t believe we’re necessarily born judgmental, we certainly develop this discriminatory outlook on life at one point or another.

The same way we discover lying.

I tend to be weary of anyone who claims to never lie. That’s such an obvious lie that either the person is blatantly taking me to be a fool, or, worse, they are not willing to admit the truth to their own selves. We all lie. It’s human nature. Some of us do it more compulsively. Some of us do it only under the pretense that they’re sparing the other person’s feelings. Some people have been doing it for so long that they don’t even notice it anymore.

But everybody lies.

I have never met an adult who has never lied.

Neither have I met one who doesn’t judge.

You think you are open-minded? Think back to the last time you saw someone with seven piercings on her face? How about the girl in pink tight leather pants with high heels and a low-cut blouse? The guy who wears big silver chains around his neck and no t-shirts? The fifty-year-old man who drives a Porsche convertible? The girl in a three-piece suit with a pearl necklace talking on her cell phone? Two men holding hands? A teenager kissing a seventy year old?

No matter how open minded you are, at least one of the above scenarios will make you jump to conclusions about a person. You make judgement calls on how much money she has or whether she works or not. You assume she must be after his money or that he must be not well educated. She must be a bitch and he must be fun to be around.

You might not hate any of the people. Judgmental doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re bigoted. It just means that you judge people on a certain set of criteria. We all have categories that we like to place people in and we use certain cues when we meet them to figure out in which category they best fit.

The most common cues are visual. If you want to test this out, give the same picture to a few friends and ask them to tell you about the person in the picture. How old is she? What does she to for a living? Would you like this person? Why?

I guarantee you that they will have answers. Most likely different ones (unless you have a really homogenous circle) but none of them will say that they cannot answer until they meet the person.

Our categories are defined by our surroundings. Possibly at the beginning by the values of our family, and then school, friends, work, etc. With each new environment and year, we might define the categories more specifically and we might realize that most people can’t be classified easily.

But we do it anyway.

Previously? Fuck.