By Dina Aldabbagh

Life is far more complex than we can even fathom. The more I write these blogs, and ask myself to think in a cohesive enough way to communicate to others, the more I see this very play in action. As human beings, we like to be strong behind stances. Conviction, in a way, means ease — because it closes the loop. When you know what you believe, it closes the loop on how much you have to think about every single situation.

This is normal and human and not incorrect, however…it can also lend itself to the not so helpful tendency to be over-certain about things. To jump to conclusions. To think you know it all from seeing oh-so little. The truth of the matter is that we just don’t know. There’s oftentimes so much more to the whole picture that we can even fathom, and the only way to make a truly fair judgment would be to consider every single thing.

The only way to be truly just in our judgments is if we took every single influence into consideration. If we were able to understand every single force that was acting upon something to understand why it was the way it was, only then could we make a truly fair assessment of what’s happening.

But this is the opposite of how human beings work. We need to have conviction behind things, right? That’s fine — but my advice is to watch what you have conviction about. Let the things that you have conviction about be the things that only pertain to yourself. Because sometimes you may think you know enough about someone else’s situation to judge them, but you don’t.

To understand why someone is the way they are would entail understanding their entire history, probably their family’s history, and an understanding of their nervous system down to a T. Are you a psychiatrist? Do you have a PhD in neurology? Then how can you possibly perfectly judge them?

Things are complex. Again, far, far more complex than one person’s set of eyes can understand. Even with a team of people, the puzzle is still not complete, and the picture is still skewed. Therefore, watch how harshly you judge other people. For you do not understand the full picture.

Now a distinction has to be made. It’s one thing to say, “Because I don’t know their full situation, I’m going to let this slide.” But let’s make a clarification of what it means to “let something slide.” For example, if someone is yelling at you every single day, you can fully understand that they’re probably not an evil person, but rather have many of their own issues and many other forces acting upon them to have made them the person that they are today, while also still fully deciding to not have them in your life.

Letting something slide does not mean allowing abuse or closeness over and over again. All letting something slide needs to mean for you is that you do not waste your energy making moral judgments on another person. The truth is that you will never know enough to make a full moral judgment on someone else. 

Other people can do wrong without you being the one to judge them. Other people can do wrong without you being the one to punish them. You are not their executioner, you aren’t the one who’s been asked to correct them. You, of course, don’t have to allow treatment that is negatively impacting you to stay in your life, but at the very same time, you also don’t have to judge that other person.

You don’t know enough. Humble yourself. Let that truth humble you. You are not God and you will never know enough about someone’s situation to be justified in villainizing them.

I like to think about it like this: you don’t have to be the one to make the situation better, but you also don’t have to make it worse. If someone is not acting morally “proper,” that’s not at all your responsibility to take care of. In fact, you’ll be much much happier in life if you just focus on correcting yourself.

What quietly happens when we’re trying to correct somebody else is that we are trying to control them. You’ll never have control over another person. Maybe in a moment, you can coerce or control someone else by force, but that cannot last. You cannot control others. You can only control yourself. In the meantime of trying to control other people, you spend your energy and put a pressure on yourself that creates chronic stress.

This is the pressure of thinking that you have to make sure the whole world is correct. The pressure is far too much for anyone to handle, considering that we all have free will. Therefore, you cannot make someone be anything else, and the pursuit of such a thing will only hurt you in the end.

In order to be able to release the need to control other people, first, I think it’s important to understand the complexity of life. Once you can look at someone else’s actions and see that they actually have nothing to do with you — but they are influenced by forces outside of yourself, and that you don’t need to be the person who corrects them — then you are suddenly freed from having to judge them.

To judge other people only hurts us. And the only way to get out of judging other people is to recognize that there’s a complex ecosystem around them that you don’t bear witness to constantly. 

You must have some perspective — that which informs you that there is actually so much perspective that you do not have. 

Anytime you feel the urge to be the person who corrects another, remind yourself that it’s not your job and that you ultimately don’t know everything that’s going on. Focus on yourself. You are the only person you can completely control. You want to feel some power in your life? Control yourself.