Why We Judge People Before We Know Their Story

One of the first things my wife and I usually ask each other after leaving a party is, “So… what was the gossip?” I wish I could tell you we’ve grown out of that by now, but we haven’t. I think most people are like that if they’re being honest. There’s just something about hearing what’s going on in other people’s lives. Sometimes it’s harmless. Sometimes we judge people before we know the whole story. I’ve been just as guilty of that as anyone else.

What I’ve realized over the last several years is that I spent a lot of my life worrying about what people were saying behind my back while, at the very same time, I was talking about other people behind theirs.

That isn’t easy to admit, but I think it’s true.

Maybe one of the reasons I worried so much about being judged was because I knew how easy it was to judge someone else. I grew up around it. Friends did it. Family did it. I did it. It was just part of life. You’d leave somewhere, get in the car, and before long the conversation would turn into who said what, who was acting strange, or what was really going on in someone else’s life.

The older I get, though, the harder that’s become. Not because I’ve somehow stopped judging people. I haven’t. It’s because life has a way of humbling you. The more people I’ve watched struggle, the more mistakes I’ve made myself, and the more life I’ve lived, the more I’ve realized how little I actually know about what someone else is carrying around.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped asking,

“What’s wrong with that person?”

And I started wondering,

“What happened to them?”

 

The Story I Didn’t Know About My Dad

The first person that comes to mind when I think about that question is my dad.

If you’ve read some of my earlier articles, you know we didn’t have the easiest relationship growing up. I don’t want to spend this article rehashing all of that because that’s not really where I’m going today.

What I want to talk about is what changed.

As a kid, I was scared of my dad. Not because he was the biggest guy around, but because I never knew when he was going to get angry. One minute everything could seem fine, and the next it felt like someone had flipped a switch. I remember wondering how someone who loved their kids could get so mad over what seemed like almost nothing.

For years, that was the whole story in my mind. My dad had a bad temper, and that was all I needed to know.

As I got older, though, I started learning about the parts of his life that happened long before I was born. I found out how close he was to his mom before she passed away when he was still a boy. I learned that he went to live with a grandfather who, by all accounts, was extremely hard on him. Somewhere along the way, I realized the man I knew as “Dad” had once been a scared kid himself.

That doesn’t erase what happened when I was growing up, and it doesn’t excuse the choices he made. But it did something I never expected.

It made me curious instead of angry. I think learning to see my dad differently also helped me learn to see myself differently. It’s hard to forgive someone else without eventually learning to forgive yourself too.

Instead of only remembering the father I was afraid of, I started wondering what kind of childhood could shape someone into the man I knew. I stopped seeing him as someone who simply had a short fuse and started seeing someone who may have been carrying around pain that had been passed down long before I ever came along.

Once I started asking those questions, I couldn’t stop. I found myself reading about childhood trauma, anger, and how the way we’re raised often shapes the way we raise our own kids. I don’t know how much comes from the generations before us and how much comes from the choices we make ourselves, but I knew one thing for sure.

Whatever had been handed down through my family, I wanted it to stop with me.

I’m still not perfect. My mouth still gets out in front of my brain sometimes, and there are days I’d love to have a few minutes back. But I also know we’re moving in the right direction. I can tell by the way my boys smart off to me every now and then that they’re nowhere near as afraid of me as I was of my dad.

Most parents probably wouldn’t use backtalk as a measuring stick for success, but in a strange way, I do.

It tells me they feel safe enough to have a voice.

And to me, that’s a cycle worth breaking.

 

The Older I Get, the Less I Judge People

My dad wasn’t the only person I started seeing differently.

As I got older, I realized I’d spent a lot of years judging people for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes it was stereotypes. Sometimes it was something I’d heard from somebody else. Other times it was simply because they didn’t live their life the way I thought they should.

The older version of me wants to go back, grab that younger version by the shoulders, and ask him one simple question.

Who the hell are you to judge anybody?

My life wasn’t exactly something people should’ve been taking notes on. I had my own problems. I made my own mistakes. Somehow, I still found ways to convince myself I was better than someone else because our struggles looked different.

I remember judging people for using drugs I would’ve never touched. In my mind, I had standards. I wasn’t like them.

Meanwhile, I was doing a pretty good job of damaging my own life with alcohol.

But hey… those weed smokers were the worst.

It’s amazing the stories we can tell ourselves when we don’t want to admit we’re not all that different.

I still see people doing it today. Someone with one kind of addiction looks down on someone with a different one. Someone who’s made one set of mistakes acts like another person’s mistakes are somehow worse. We do it with politics, religion, parenting, money, and just about everything else. We compare our strengths to someone else’s weaknesses and somehow walk away feeling like we’ve won something.

I don’t think I’ve become a better person as I’ve gotten older.

I think life has humbled me enough to realize that if our circumstances had been different, some of us might have ended up making the exact same choices as the people we judge.

 

Maybe It Was Never One Big Moment

People always talk about that one moment that changed their life. That one conversation, one decision, or one event where everything suddenly clicked. I honestly don’t know if I’ve ever had one of those.

Maybe it just takes me a hundred little instances to finally catch on to something. I don’t usually have one big moment where everything suddenly makes sense. It feels more like a bunch of little experiences that slowly add up until one day I realize I’m seeing things differently than I used to.

It was watching people struggle. Losing people I loved. Raising kids. Listening to motivational videos while I drove my route. Writing these articles every week and trying to make sense of whatever’s bouncing around in my head.

None of those things changed me by themselves, but somewhere along the way they all started adding up.

One day I realized I wasn’t so sure I had people figured out anymore. The older I got, the more I realized how little I actually knew about the lives people had lived before they crossed my path. Maybe that was when I realized I didn’t know nearly as much as I thought I did. Or maybe it just came from making enough mistakes of my own that it became harder to look down on someone else’s.

Maybe that’s how life works too.

We don’t always notice ourselves changing while it’s happening. Sometimes we just wake up one day and realize we don’t see people the same way we used to.

If that’s what happened to me, I’m grateful for it. If it helps me understand people a little better, and maybe helps someone else feel understood along the way, that’s more than enough for me.

 

I’ve Been Wrong About Enough People

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that my first thought doesn’t have to be my final thought.

I still catch myself judging people all the time. Sometimes I realize it halfway through the thought. Other times it isn’t until a few minutes later that I stop and ask myself what I’m even doing. At the end of the day, that’s just another person trying to live their life, just like I am.

I’ve started doing something that probably helps me more than it helps anyone else. When someone cuts me off in traffic, acts rude, or seems angry for no reason, I try to make up a reason for it. Maybe they’re rushing to the hospital. Maybe they just got terrible news. Maybe they’re exhausted from working too much. And maybe none of those things are true.

I honestly have no idea.

What I do know is that making up a kinder story usually leaves me in a much better place than making up an angry one. Maybe that driver really is just inconsiderate. Maybe the cashier is having a bad day. Maybe the customer who’s short with me has something going on at home that I’ll never know about. Getting angry doesn’t improve my day, and it certainly doesn’t improve theirs.

I think that’s true in just about every part of life. Some people simply aren’t as good at certain things as others. Some people grew up with opportunities that others never had. Some people are carrying burdens they’ve never told another soul about.

I’ve been wrong about enough people in my life that I’m not in nearly as much of a hurry to figure someone out anymore.

What I’m Still Learning

If I’ve learned anything over the last several years, it’s that I probably don’t know as much about people as I think I do.

I still catch myself judging someone once in a while. The difference now is that I usually catch myself before I let that first thought grow into something bigger. Instead of deciding I have someone all figured out, I remind myself that I’m only seeing one small part of their life. I’ve lived long enough to know how much can be hidden behind a smile, a bad attitude, or one bad decision.

I hope my boys figure that out a lot sooner than I did. Not because I expect them to never get angry or never judge anyone. They’re human. I just hope they learn to pause before deciding they know someone’s whole story.

The truth is, I still don’t always know where these articles are going when I sit down to write. Most weeks I just start typing and hope something honest comes out of it. Maybe that’s exactly how this change happened too. I wasn’t trying to become a different person. I was just trying to make sense of my own life, and somewhere along the way, the way I saw other people changed too.

The next time my wife and I leave a party, I’m sure one of us will still ask, “So… what was the gossip?”

I just hope somewhere during that drive home we spend a little less time deciding what’s wrong with people and a little more time wondering what they’ve been through.

Because somewhere along the way, I stopped asking,

“What’s wrong with that person?”

And I started wondering,

“What happened to them?”

Before You Go

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