How I am trying to stop judging, unsuccessfully ...

On the first day after I moved to the US, I got myself a US cell number, and sent messages to all my friends. 

How are you? I am here. Let’s connect.

One friend didn’t respond back. 

So after a few days I wrote again, “Charlie, what’s up? Let’s talk when you have some time.” No response. I could see he’d read both my messages. Maybe he’s busy, I thought. 

A few days went by. And it started to bother me. What if he’s not busy? What if he doesn’t want to respond to me? Did something happen in our last interaction? Is it because I didn’t write to him for so long? Maybe he does not care? How can people be like that? It’s infuriating. 

A couple of months later, I sent him yet another message. Still no response. 

And so it went through the year. It annoyed me greatly that he couldn’t find the time to text me back, even if to say that he’s tied up. I thought a little less of him. This is how people change. They will only speak to you when they have a need. I used to like him. Think of him as a good friend. Maybe it was misplaced. And so on.

As I was looking to return back to India early this year, much against my instinct, I sent him yet another message. 

“Charlie, I missed talking to you last year. I hope you’re staying safe and well.” And this time his response came back “Thanks for the note. Sorry, just see a cell number? Who’s this?”. 

In all my excitement to get in touch I never told him it was me who was texting.

Why do we find it so hard to resist judging, even though our lived experience tells us we are often wrong? 

A large part of it is just human nature. We like to understand the world around us, make sense of it. So when we have an experience that we do not fully understand, we need to ascribe meaning to it. We attribute causality. This happened because of that reason. He didn’t write back to me because he doesn’t care about keeping in touch. That way things start to make a little more sense. The world is a little less impenetrable. And therefore a little less threatening.

The problem is – we are not very good at figuring out reasons, and certainly not about human behavior. We tend to look at situations through the lens of our own past experience, and pick the explanation that best fits our beliefs. This again is human nature.

Psychologists call this confirmation bias. Wikipedia defines this as “the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values.”

These beliefs, in turn, have been formed through a subconscious process – through hand-me-down stereotypes from our upbringing and social context, quickly formed generalizations, and unconscious distillation of life experiences. We rarely look to examine these beliefs. They may have been accurate in a specific situation, but to imagine that they could explain every experience is both simplistic and incorrect.

The thing is – I have known all of this for a while. Many years back, I read this quote that had a profound impact on me:

I spent time examining my beliefs and promising myself to be aware of when I was interpreting circumstances based on incomplete information. I tried to be aware of when I was projecting my own fears, doubts and insecurities while looking at the external world. I read articles and books and listened to TED talks.

I learnt about how we often tend to judge people’s character and personality based on their response in a given situation. Instead of seeing the action in the moment for what it is, we attribute it to a deficiency in their personality. We generalize. 

It’s easy. And lazy.

Often our own triggers unknowingly act on us as we interact with the world. Perhaps we are tired or unhappy or stressed, and then we tend to be a little less kind and a little less empathetic and attribute bad intent, or bad character based on an individual interaction. Sometimes it is even satisfying to do so.

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves” – Carl Jung

I understood all this. I consciously tried to practice all this. And yet as the Charlie story shows, this tendency to judge is so deep rooted that it almost creeps up on us gradually, eluding our rational mind and training. 

Every day, I continue to learn that understanding is simply not enough. Like many things in life, this requires constant vigil.

I am trying. I am committed to not giving up.