Why are you so judge-y?
How mainstream is your contempt?
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There are two sections to this week’s Love Letter, one in which I consider why people are so free about sharing their mean little biases so openly and the second part about a very funny application letter for a job and what my mother gave me by working.
Why you be so mean?
There is a church in the middle of Berlin that is very well known because only half of it is still there. Most of it was laid to ruin during a bombing raid in 1943. The preserved ruin, the brutalist new church and clock tower built on either side of it, and the plaza it stands on have become memorials to peace and tolerance.
Places like that can seem to be referring to monstrous historic events that lead to death and destruction and not to the petty little hostilities harboured in our individual little selves.
I once visited someone I didn’t know very well for four and a half hours. When I got back, Sam asked me how it was and I said it was nice. I’d hardly spoken, but I liked listening to their stories. I had mostly listened.
Except when the person fell into a rant about things like refugees, ‘the gays’, people who live on the streets, and hijabs. My eyes glazed over then. I had decided not to dignify rants like these by engaging, to just wait them out. I told Sam I wondered whether at some point it had become obvious that I had ceased to listen.
Sam said: ‘Do we do that? Do we ever start a little rant in the middle of polite conversation?’
I think we mostly saved our rants for around dinner tables where we are assured that our companions mostly share our world views and, if they don’t, we know that we and they are robust enough for a discussion that might change someone’s mind – and that they won’t mind having it changed. Although I have caught myself going a little off-piste in my pottery group sometimes. I feel very at home there.
Mostly, I don’t talk about my politics because they’re so far beyond people’s comfort zones that I know I would endanger relationships by holding forth.
But that’s the thing, isn’t it, Sam said. People with those sort of knee-jerk views on society seldom consider their effect on others.
After I wrote about naturism, I discovered that there are quite a number of people who disapprove of – or at the very least mock – nudists. Nudists are soft targets, if you’ll excuse the built-in joke. Naked bodies are almost universally seen as shameful or funny, so I suppose there’ll always be jokes about people who don’t find them shameful or funny.
But there are lots of more mainstream things people whine about in my presence too: headscarves, tattoos, fat women who wear tight clothes, ‘wokeness’ (always, always said in a tone that feels like someone just spat on the ground), pronouns, cis-men who paint their nails, non-binary people who wear dresses but refuse to remove their body hair, piercings not in earlobes (as though earlobe piercing is entirely rational while a nose piercing signifies a fall from grace), women who don’t shave their armpits, and trans. women. full. stop.
The most peculiar aspects of these little rants are 1. the assumption that I will agree with them, and 2. that I don’t mind having superficial conversations about very complex things.
None of the things that rile other people really bother me at all. I notice something, it goes in, I register it, work it through my values filter, and that’s pretty much the end of it.
I am not free of judgment though.
I don’t like grimy homes or offices, stained tea mugs, and dirty toenails.
I can’t bear it when people spit, especially when they that do that hawking sound, or when they blow their noses by pressing one nostril closed and shooting snot on to the ground.
When people play their music in a public place, especially in nature, I have to dig deep to find my inner Yoda.
People who can’t be bothered to reduce their consumption, recycle their packaging and reuse what can be reused – I have judge-y thoughts about them.
Inconsiderate people who move through the world as though they are the only ones in it – and the only ones with a valid world view – in general, elicit my Inner Karen.
So what’s the difference, I asked Sam. Why do I think it’s okay to be judgmental about these things, but it’s not okay to remark, willy-nilly, on someone’s size, how they decorate, dress or fail to dress their bodies, who they love or how they get their rocks off.
Maybe, Sam suggested, our peculiar judgments, as long as they don’t harm people, are okay. Especially when we question them and think about them. It’s when we judge the same people great swathes of society are judging, that we need to question our judgment.
Why are you like that?
I had a group of brilliant women friends over for lunch for one of my birthdays. They were not my inner circle, but we all knew one another through various networks.
I told them about something incredibly nasty that had been said to me, out of the blue, and that had made me feel as though someone had vomited on me on purpose and that it was entirely personal.
Why are people so mean?
Helen, who is one of the most talented, kind-hearted and funny people I know said: ‘In the few minutes I am mean to someone, I feel better about myself.’
I was shook. I didn’t know that she could be nasty. But I was also surprised at her insight and her honesty.
Helen’s admission bears out the psychological idea of projection: the things that we worry might be true about us, we dump on someone else.
There are other reasons people are judgmental:
Being bitchy about someone, especially if you have a talent for sharp observation, can be very funny. Being funny wins you attention and it’s an easy way of weaselling your way into group acceptance.
Being cutting directly to someone asserts your power. If you feel unconsciously threatened by them, being mean makes you feel superior and more in control.
Being critical focuses your attention outside yourself. It’s easier to be mean than to do self-reflection.
Everyone judges. It’s how we organise our own identities, our preferences and our values.
What I question though, is the wisdom of sowing our mean little thoughts in casual conversation.
How does that make the world a better place?
My working mother
My daughter is visiting my mother for a few days and found this letter and sent it to me without context. I couldn’t stop laughing.
‘What is this?’ I asked her, ‘Did Ouma write it?’
‘No. You did,’ she said.
Apparently my mother had asked for guidance about how to structure a covering letter on a job application. And this is what I sent her.
Apart from being amazed at how there are some things you simply have NO recollection of at all, this artefact from the past gave me a moment of appreciation for the mother I have. Because:
This was about twenty years ago, which means she was still career building on the cusp of turning 60.
She turns 80 this year. She is still working, though only three days a week. She told me in March she was going to resign this year and had told her boss. I asked her whether her boss believed her. She said she didn’t think so. I asked her whether she believed herself. She said she didn’t think so.
When I had children and insisted on breastfeeding both for long, my mother told me not to stop working and not to become dependent on my husband’s salary. It turned out to be excellent advice, though I didn’t want to hear it right then.
It wasn’t easy for my mother to work, for various reasons, but she always insisted on it, though it caused conflict. Also, back in Seventies and Eighties, people openly bad-mouthed working mothers.
By having a career she enjoyed, she created a life for herself outside the home – which she still had to run as though she wasn’t working – and made lasting relationships.
She has never not had work. She has never not been independent.
The benefits to children of having a working mother are numerous. Studies bear this out. I’ve never much thought about what my mother’s career meant for me. It was what it was. We don’t think about our parents’ lives much except when we perceive their choices as impinging negatively on our own comfort.
I can’t ever remember her work having any negative effect on me at all. And I know that if she hadn’t worked, I would never have been able to study.
It was because of my mother’s unusual example – and her determination to help me get a degree when I decided that was what I wanted even though we didn’t have money for it – that I was able to become a journalist and then an independent writer, editor and translator.
She got that job by the way. She hated it. Used it as a springboard for something else.
Onwards and upwards.
Lots of love,
K.
Just wonderful. Thank you -- always so relatable. Makes one feel less lonely ⭕️
Thank you once again Karin, I do enjoy reading your Love Letters ever so much x