Do you ever wonder if you’re too judgmental? Of others, of yourself, of everything? Sometimes it seems like we’re always only just observing the world in order to slap a big old label of good or bad on everything we fucking see. The Stoics would say most of what troubles us lies in these good/bad “value judgments” that we might not even consciously realize that we’re making, and wondering why we’re so goddamn miserable all the time. I would imagine that the most miserable people out there would have a disproportionate amount of things they would label as bad, and very few things that they would call good. I know I’ve been there. Even when things aren’t going particularly bad, when small inconveniences start to snowball into a really bad fucking day, a stubbed toe might feel to us to be the icing on the shit cake which is our dreadful fucking existence.
It’s hard to start dissecting our thoughts to weed out the unnecessary parts, to remove our opinions and our preconceptions of everyday life and to see things in a truly dispassionate way, but imagine if we could develop that skill? To perceive the world with a new curiosity, free of those judgments that are all too easy to simplify the world into, and just say “this is what there is, neither good nor bad.” If our thinking can make things awful to us, can it not also make things wonderful? Not false optimism, but true gratitude for how complex the world is, and how even further complex our own consciousness is in interpreting the world around us.
It wouldn’t hurt just to pay attention to our internal dialogue and say to it:
Here’s what I experience, without judgment.
Or better yet
Here’s what I experience, neither “good” nor “bad”, and I’m grateful for the opportunity.