Don’t Yuk Somone’s Yum!

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 Don’t Yuk Somone’s Yum!

We are quick to judge. It’s an evolutionary artifact and it was necessary to judge EVERYTHING for our survival. We needed to judge whether something tasted good, whether something was going to harm us, or whether SOMEONE was going to harm us. We come by it naturally.

Fast forward a million years or so, and we’ve become quite adept at judging, but we often don’t need to for survival--it’s become more of a reflex action. 

My wish is that I stifle this reflex significantly. For example, someone might say “I just enjoyed Chinese food at restaurant X” and my predilection may be to say “oh, I ate there last month, the food was crap, the service sucked, and restaurant Y is way better”. My issue with that immediate “judgy” reaction is that it intrudes upon someone else’s narrative. It is THEIR story and unless they explicitly solicit my opinion on restaurant X, I have no cause to add MY narrative to THEIR story. I would certainly not appreciate it if someone dumped their unsolicited opinions when I was sharing MY story. It is almost like saying “you may like restaurant X, but I don’t, so you are wrong”. If I did not share the same feeling of restaurant X, I may be inclined to say, “I’m glad you enjoyed your meal at restaurant X”.

Yuking someone’s Yum invalidates their story, and by extension, that person.

 

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