Think back to the last time something went wrong at work, or in your home, or in a relationship.
It could be a project that didn’t go as expected or wasn’t completed on schedule. It could be you failed to clean up after your friends when they came over. Or your significant other forgot your birthday during a particularly busy stretch of life.
Regardless of how you yourself were involved in whatever mishap took place, what was your first reaction to discovering that it had happened?
If you’re like most people I know, you thought of excuses, either for yourself or for others. Or you looked for blame, and pointed fingers. If you didn’t do these things and did a mea culpa (deserved or not), kudos to you.
But most do not do this, in my experience. They are too deep in the judgment vortex.
When I say vortex, I picture one of those swirling disturbances in the air from my Dungeons and Dragons days as a kid. You get too close, and you get sucked in to whatever doom lies hidden within.
The judgment vortex is a collective mindset version of that same wizard’s trap from my youth. And when I say collective, I mean the whole damn world.
Social and mass media are pervasive and constant elements in our lives. Not only are we as instantly connected as ever to our loved ones, but also to our acquaintances, and our enemies, and celebrities we love and hate, and politicians and, really, the entire bleeping world.
The spotlight is ON for each and every one of us, all the time.
The fact is, stuff goes wrong. Let’s be fair and call it an even split of stuff going right and stuff going wrong. That means, half the time, something negative is happening. And because we’re in the spotlight now, we’re involved.
Our identity can’t take it. We react the same way as we do at work or at home; we excuse; we blame. We can’t accept that it is our fault. Our self-esteem can’t withstand that hit, or at least so we have convinced ourselves.
And with everyone doing it, all the time, on the Everywhere Mass Communication of today’s world, it has become a judgment vortex. We blame others. We see others blame others. We feel good about convincing ourselves (if no one else) that we are not to blame. We see others are doing it, too, so we derive implied social validation from doing it.
That benevolent endorphin rush we get from determining that we are the “good guys” is addicting. Who doesn’t want to feel like they have no responsibility for the ills of the world? Life is a lot happier when we don’t shoulder the world’s problems, after all.
A school shooting? Blame the Republicans and the NRA. Inner city drug problem? Blame the Democrats handcuffing law enforcement. Your kid got an F in history this past semester? Well, that history teacher sucks; it has nothing to do with you not being on your kid about doing his homework, yup.
The judgment vortex is only a quick fix. It’s a Band-Aid on the bigger issue. When we spend so much time blaming and judging others, and they are doing the same to us, who is fixing the actual problem?
Right. You know the answer to that.
Ditch the vortex and be part of the solution. Don’t look for reasons why something happened. Look for solutions to fix the result. And look for ways to stop it from happening again.
If we could get everyone on board with this, maybe the ratio of good stuff to bad stuff happening in the world would actually go up for once.