Don’t Judge Me

When something is taken away, you have a new appreciation when it returns. This morning is no exception. After having to leave paradise for a few days on business, it’s wonderful to be home.

I value my time here in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, sitting on the octagon-shaped screen porch — the same one pictured in an old torn sepia photograph from 1899, when this house was built on the lake. In those days everything was formal, unlike lake life today. It was women in long white dresses, big hats, and parasols, the men in straw hats and suits, stepping into a wooden boat, ready to row to the other lake for a lakeside church service. I feel the privilege of carrying on the tradition of morning tea on this porch, where they sat 127 years before me.

History Relived

The people in the 1890s came here for the same reasons I do: a break from the city, cooler air, and time with family and the lake friends they reconnected with each summer. Their gatherings, usually cocktail parties, required a tux or a coat and tie. Ours are usually just a casual shirt and shorts.

Less formality has made room for something better: actually seeing people, instead of their costumes. Sometimes I think people hide behind their designer clothes and high-end watches to send signals that “I’m better.”

Mr. Social

Though I started out shy and quiet, I believe I was born to be a social animal. And summer brings lots of opportunities to listen. I love meeting new people and hearing what they’ve done with their lives. 

In my younger, more eager and insecure days, I was more interested in telling my own story. These days I feel less need to feed my ego. Most people love talking about themselves, and I love giving them the chance. I always learn things. This past week, for instance, I learned nearly everything there is to know about the challenges of raising cattle, something I’d never otherwise understand.

Don’t Do This!

“In polite society, you never ask someone what they do for a living,” I was told once. “The challenge is learning as much as you can about someone, and getting them to tell you about themselves without ever asking what they do.” Though I care less about the rules of polite society these days, I still treat it as a personal challenge: how much can I learn without asking the “What do you do for a living?” question.

Someone once told me that people ask “What do you do?” to assess whether you’re worth talking to. I hear that a lot. They ask, I answer, they say something nice and find a quick excuse to move on, as if they’re screening for new clients or people who fit their mold. If someone’s sizing me up for my usefulness to them, I’d rather not waste my breath. After all, I’m useful to everyone 🙂

The Gift of Gab

My dad had a tremendous gift for getting to know people. He could talk to anybody, at any level, and make them feel heard and special, not because he wanted something, but because he was genuinely interested. Around our small lake town, I still run into people who tell me he made them feel special. That’s rare. I wish I had those skills.

What I loved about him is that he never judged anyone. No one was below him. He held his own with people some would perceive as “more important” as well as with those who might feel they are at the bottom of the food chain. He treated everyone the same.

Dressing Down

Sometimes people judge you not only by what you do, but by how you look. My dad taught me to always be dressed at least as well as the average at any event I was attending. “Always have at least a sport coat,” he’d tell me, though he was mortified when I wore one with jeans, since he’d grown up on a farm, where jeans were for work, not for dressing up.

An art dealer in New York once told me about a man in flip-flops and a T-shirt he’d snubbed as a time-waster. He was used to people wandering into his gallery and treating it like a museum, a place to look at paintings and ask questions, with no intention, or ability, to buy. He’d wrongly assumed the T-shirt guy was one of them, until the man came back two weeks later and spent half a million dollars on paintings.

Hidden Gems

Then there’s the guy I met recently working in a car repair shop, looking and acting like a regular grease monkey. I struck up a conversation, starting with old cars, which led to what he’d done before: he told me he was the retired CEO of a big company, and he worked at the shop simply because he loved working on cars. His co-workers have no idea he once had hundreds of people reporting to him, and he probably prefers it that way.

Leveling Out

I grew up around modest, God-fearing people who lived this out. They weren’t just tolerant, they were something better: levelers, people who saw everyone (the banker and the woman cleaning the floors) as equally worth their time. Judge not, or you’ll be judged. No matter who we are, or our station in life, we are all equal and deserve to be treated as such.

Farming New Crops

These days, the instinct to judge people we haven’t bothered to know is only getting more pronounced. Social media has built an entire business model on it. There are click farms where hundreds of people are paid to manufacture judgment at scale: hateful content, tailored to an agenda, rewarded with cash for every view. I once met a man who described visiting a click farm with 200 people sitting at computers doing nothing but pumping out political propaganda. If you repeat something enough times, across enough accounts — some of which might be the same people wearing different masks — people start to believe it, especially once they see others agreeing. He told me these people even comment on their own posts pretending to be someone else, just to make people who see it feel like they’re not alone.

I try to help my kids see that what they’re clicking on might not be true, and that the more they click, the more of that same content gets placed in their feed, reinforcing what they already believe. In this age, when even “facts” seem distorted, it’s important to intentionally seek out other points of view. 

Rich Rewards

We wouldn’t judge the man in flip-flops, the grease monkey, or the woman cleaning the floors if we actually sat down and learned about them. But that’s exactly what a click farm is built to prevent us from doing with people we’ll never meet: whole groups reduced to a stereotype, repeated until it feels true. It’s the same shortcut, the same failure of imagination, just multiplied by a couple of hundred people at computers.

That’s the discipline this porch keeps teaching me, 127 years running. Whoever sat here in these old wicker chairs in 1899 couldn’t have imagined a click farm, but they’d have recognized the temptation it feeds: deciding someone’s worth before you’ve actually met them, and making it all about you.

Digging for Gold

Keep in mind that everyone you meet has a story worth hearing. Everyone has the same hurts and some of the same challenges, the same insecurities, and we’re all just a wounded child on the inside. If you dig, you’ll find a fascinating story in everyone you meet. 

Eric Rhoads