Hello! The above recording calls this dispatch #031821 but it is actually #031721, as evidenced by the current day of the week. As always, you can reply to this e-mail by simply tapping, “Reply.” You can also subscribe to this newsletter if you are not yet a subscriber by punching the button below. Punch punch.
I was walking up Lexington Avenue on a recent Saturday morning when I encountered two girls of early high school age standing on a corner, hunched towards each other and staring at a phone screen, speaking loudly to someone on the receiving end of their video call. I presume the other person was at a store shopping because one of the girls on my side was directing her away from a rack until she landed upon something of interest. Then she said, “Yes! That one. I’m so going to get that top instead of the other one I liked. It’s not as cool, but it’s like, much sexier.” She said it in that tone of voice that high school girls basically sing to each other -- it’s like a mix of vocal fry and this paradoxically welcoming standoffishness.
I wasn’t explicitly listening to their conversation, nor was I particularly interested in it, but I heard the comment in passing while crossing the street which I mention only because there were two older women walking behind me and as soon as we were far enough away from the girls on Facetime, they started to cackle to each other under their breath in a tone of intimacy that was familiar to me -- it’s that of two people who are in the process of striking a bond over a mutual judgment of something or one else. It had not occurred to me that I myself didn’t consciously pass a judgment of the girls (though clearly, I was making one about the women) instead I observed.
I think?
Because I did pass a judgment subconsciously — how, otherwise, would I have been able to fill in so many gaps of assumption? I went so far as to blatantly believe that they were cackling because of the two young girls. I never turned around to look at them, and have no idea if they’d been talking about something else completely that elicited the snicker but it went on. I imagined what the two women were thinking, “Oh how pathetic to be young and trapped in the vanity vortex. Dying to appease the gaze of a boy who doesn’t know his ass from his mouth!”
One further, I thought, “Remember when that was us?”
This conjecture was a reflection of my own, layered judgment -- that I could draw these conclusions about what the walking women behind me were thinking about the young girls behind them reflects only what a) I assumed about the former and b) what I myself may have consciously thought or said about the girls if I were in the same position that the women were in -- that is, walking together with someone else as opposed to by myself.
It got me thinking about when we are most likely to pass judgment. Of course, we are always discriminating in some way -- developing thoughts, beliefs, opinions, or writing stories to accommodate our perception of the world around us as we interpret it through the lens of our respective, personal experiences -- unique, infinite, and inimitable as they are.
Judgment also protects us -- it enables our discerning the difference between what we deem safe and not, healthy and unhealthy. For the sake of this dispatch, I’m speaking specifically of social judgment.
So when are we most likely to let these social judgments out? If I were with a friend, particularly one who had a high school experience that was similar to my own, I am fairly certain I would have looked at her and rolled my eyes, signaling a sort of separation from the girls. One way I, or we, were now above their antics. But when one feels the need to assert themselves above something or one else, is that because deep down we’re trying to suppress something — fear, discomfort, self-disgust: the precise ways we’ve known ourselves to be just like the completely unfounded stories we have written about who they are (self-centered, shallow, sheltered, etc)?
I’d like to think that if I were to have passed an out-loud judgment, put it out into the world to assert something about myself in commenting about them, it would have been more tender -- a sort of poking of jovial fun at me. Because 15 years ago, I was in fact that girl, on that corner, sing-songing in that same teenage voice about the sexy top I was choosing over the one I liked more. It would be less about how foolish they are and more about how foolish I am no longer.
The thing is, and I’m really asking this question to myself: is it ever okay to use someone else, or rather, am I comfortable using someone else as a proxy to see myself?
It’s not even actually to see myself, it’s more like, to feel good (or conversely worse) about myself.
I see no real way around this lest we try to dissect what it is we want to prove when we judge, and to whom we are trying to prove it.
For me, judging is like signaling -- on the one hand, I might be trying to create a connection with another person, bidding to strike a bond over a mutual disdain (this, I am sure, is a very human desire -- to relate, to connect, to be seen, but when we use negative judgment to get there, we might not realize that in the process, we’re also really upsetting or offending the recipients of this judgment). On the other hand, we might be making claims about our own moral uprightness or sense of humor or intellect or insert any quality you wish to have another person see in you here.
And that -- the presence of an audience -- is what seems to condition us to more readily and frequently pass judgments out loud. To more readily and frequently amend our behavior to move as far away as possible from the judgments we fear most.
If I hadn’t heard those two women snickering, I’m pretty sure my own subconscious judgment would have stayed just there. To my conscious self, it would have been an observation, which doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have had the judgment, just that I’d have never extracted it, or further pulled it apart.
Lately, I’ve been thinking that trying to absolve oneself of judging is a pretty tall order. It demands we suppress a pretty basic cognitive function all at once. Maybe a baby step away from comparison and towards observation is more realistic.
Yeah, it might be too much to ask that we stop judging completely, but I don’t think it’s too much to suggest that one try to suspend the outward desire to prove a point about who they are by pitting themselves against another.
It is harder for sure. But it’s also true what they say: comparison is the thief of joy. The ultimate purpose/desire/resolution does not always have to be joy, but it’s a helpful virtue to aspire towards, a good antidote to the sort of disappointment, bitterness, or in its darkest hour, the supremacy that judgment propels.
Today, I invite us to consider the possibility that we’re no better or worse than each other — or anyone else in our purviews for that matter. Just a bunch of people, spectacularly different, strikingly same as we may be.
