Sunday, January 10, 2010

Why do we judge people..?

It is in our nature to judge the people around us. We judge the way our friends act in public. If they ignore our wishes, we think they are disrespectful. If a friend misses a few social occasions, we deem him a miser or a loner. Choices of a person are considered distasteful if his suggested book, movie, song or play do not align with "our thinking at that point of time". If a child commits a crime we deem their parents unfit. A hard working person is labeled as anti-cool. A thoughtful person is assumed boring. If someone deviates from a suggested path he is registered as acting-too-smart/he-is-making-a-wrong-decision. We make these judgments all the time – never thinking that one day we may be judged ourselves.

The most terrible thing about this is we never realize we are judging others on the surface, but the impact of this is so hardcoded in our brain that we almost become opinionated about them. But what happens when we finally stop for a moment and judge our own lives. It can be painful to step back and see what we have been doing. And even more painful to realize that we have no intentions of stopping.