Every day, multiple times a day, we are asked to rate our experience. We take a taxi and are asked how many stars to give the driver. We eat a meal and go onto Yelp afterwards to rate the service, food, and atmosphere. After heading to a beach, going on a hike, or hiking up to a mountain viewpoint, afterwards we go onto Google Maps and rate the experience.
We hop onto a dating app and not only are asked to judge an endless amount of people, but also do it as quickly as possible. This makes the entire process habitual, unconscious, and seemingly quite “natural.”
On top of being asked to judge every single layer of our experience, we also take these ratings very seriously. After all, who hasn’t spent hours of their lives going deep into Amazon or Trip Advisor to see if we should absolutely go through with a purchase? We think, “sure, there are around thousand five-star reviews, but what about those three people that voted one star? They’re probably the ones who are telling the truth.”
The Black Mirror episode, Nosedive, dealt with this very issue, imagining a world where every single interaction with another human being was rated. A person’s rating affected every area of their lives, including their ability to buy a house, rent a car, or take a flight on an airplane.
Considering how China already has a social credit system, you already have a credit rating that tracks every financial decision you make, ride-share drivers can get kicked off the app if their rating drops too low, and a local business’s Yelp Score directly affects their revenue, the world Black Mirror envisions is not that different from what we have now.
As a public figure with public offerings, people rate my offerings all the time. People rate my books on Amazon, my yoga classes on Yelp, my podcast on iTunes, and yoga trainings I am a part of on Yoga Alliance. These reviews directly affect my sales, my chances of getting hired or getting published, and if I am to be honest, influence my feelings too.
While I could go into how most of the reviews you read are actually fake, that companies like Yelp have accusations of extortion and more, I am not a tech writer. I am a love writer, and I think it is more important to talk about what kind of effect this judgment epidemic has on our hearts and minds.
There are many crises in our lives right now, including the COVID pandemic, climate change, and racial injustice. Many of the crises we are facing are accelerated by technology, including the rising rates of loneliness, misinformation, and political polarization.
However, I see few people talking about the fact that the same device that makes transactions happen at the click of a button also asks us to evaluate every experience of life. This constant judgment, in my opinion, robs us of the present moment and the possibility of being truly happy.
I propose a two-step process to unlearn all we have learned. We have to move from judgment to discernment, and then again from discernment to appreciation and gratitude.
First, let’s see how bad things have gotten.
What We Think, We become
One of the most important spiritual truths comes from the Buddha, “What we think, we become.” Every thought we have increases our propensity to have that same thought again. While some evaluation of our present circumstances is necessary for survival, if left unchecked it eventually takes over our life. As Hafiz put it, “what we speak becomes the house we live in.”
Any neuroscientist or psychologist will tell you the same thing: neurons that fire, wire together. Our mind is not dissimilar to a mountain of freshly laid snow. Once you go down the same path a number of times, it eventually becomes a rut; sooner or later, you will find yourself there again and again.
The more we judge, the more likely we are to judge. As the neuroscientist Rick Hanson puts it in his book Hardwiring Happiness, “Staying with a negative experience past the point that’s useful is like running laps in Hell: You dig the track a little deeper in your brain each time you go around it.”
People love to stay stuck in their negative experiences. There are YouTube videos critiquing movies that are longer than the movie itself.
This means is that the more we judge our meals, our taxis, and our fitness classes, the more likely we are to judge our family, friends and even ourselves. The more inclined we are to go onto Google Maps and rate a beach as being too sandy or the ocean as too wavy, the less inclined we are to appreciate the natural beauty around us. Rather than noticing every leaf, flower, and tree for the incredible unique phenomenon that it is, we end up comparing everything to everything else. “Well, how does this forest compare to last week’s forest? I give this mountain peak four stars.”
I had one client who spent so much time on Tinder, that when walking down the street he would look at everyone and mentally swipe left or right depending on how attracted he was to that person.
Forever Unhappy
As a result of endlessly evaluating, our mind naturally searches more on what is wrong and less on what is right. We drop out of the present moment and think about what could be improved. It becomes almost impossible to just watch a movie or read a book as this endless inner critic keeps running in the back of our mind.
We no longer can enjoy things just as they are. As a result, we are robbed of the moment and our enjoyment of it.
Even if it is something we are currently enjoying, we might worry it will not last long enough or that it is not good enough. I am reminded of the famous haiku by Zen Master Basho:
In Kyoto,
hearing the cuckoo,
I long for Kyoto.
Even during the good times, we want more of it or we think it could be better. Even when the thousand five-star product arrives at our door, by then our expectations are so high the real thing cannot live up to it.
Fortunately, there is a way out and it does not require us to sacrifice anything. The way out involves two steps, and the first is to move from judgment to discernment.
From Judgement to Discernment
Buddhist and mindfulness communities talk a lot about cultivating nonjudgment. “Nonresistance, nonjudgment, and nonattachment are the three aspects of true freedom and enlightened living,” says the spiritual teacher Eckharte Tolle.
However, I have found that many of my students get confused when I talk about nonjudgment. They think, “What, do you mean if my house gets destroyed by a tornado, you just want me to be okay with it?” It is easy to think that nonjudgment means we do not actually differentiate anything.
This is why I prefer the word discernment. Discernment still involves making observations on the world. I could say you are wearing a blue or yellow shirt, for example. That is discernment, and it is perfectly normal and necessary to function.
But judgment, on the other hand, is that extra layer on top of it that labels it as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. If I said you had an ugly blue shirt, that would be judgmental. Discernment is noticing there is a lot of salt in your mashed potatoes, but judgment is that extra layer that says dinner is ruined and the chef should be fired.
The important thing to recognize about judgment is that it is relative. If you are a farmer, a day of rain is often a welcome sign. If today is your wedding, however, rain is a complete disaster.
Discernment, however, just notices it is raining, which can be good for some people, but bad for others.
Our first step of breaking out of judgment is simply shifting to observing what is—without getting so caught up in the drama—without feeling so entitled that everything in our life should go exactly the way that we want it to.
Then we can move onto step two, which is shifting beyond discernment to actually appreciating the good things in our life.
From Discernment to Appreciation and Gratitude
Once we really acknowledge the truth of the Buddha’s teaching that what we think we become, we bring a positive intentionality to our life. We recognize our need for love and desire for happiness and actively work to cultivate those positive qualities within ourselves.
Fortunately, it is just as easy to cultivate positive states of love and gratitude as it is to cultivate the negative mental states of judgment. Rick Hanson again points out in Hardwiring Happiness that “By taking just a few extra seconds to stay with a positive experience—even the comfort in a single breath—you’ll help turn a passing mental state into lasting neural structure.”
It’s true. If you look at people with high levels of happiness in their life and those with low levels of happiness, you won’t find many differences when it comes to their life circumstances.
Rather, those who are quite happy are able to extract more happiness from the world around them and stay in it for longer periods of time. They savor more, lament less on what they don’t have and appreciate more of what they do have.
The next time you watch a movie, notice the good things. Maybe the story line is disjointed (again, using discernment) but the lighting, acting, and cinematography is quite beautiful. Maybe the meal you were served did not match what you had in mind when you ordered it, but isn’t it nice that you have food in front of you, that someone took the time to make it and that you have the opportunity to eat something new?
Rather than be frustrated at the world, we can smile at it. Rather than create division, we can build bridges; rather than judge, we can appreciate.
Soon this attitude flows over into all areas of our life. Our partner walks into the room and we don’t see how they forgot to do that thing we asked. Instead, we think of all the things they have done, and are continuing to do.
Eventually we come full circle back to ourselves. Judgment is looking in the mirror and seeing an ugly birthmark. Discernment is noticing your skin is a different color in a certain area. Appreciating is realizing you are alive, you can smile, your body can move and dance and gosh darn it, you look cute today.
Really, you do. I appreciate you, and I hope you appreciate you too.
