When we think of the word ‘judgment,’ it could be referring to judging other people and who is around us. Although we see what’s on the outside of a person, we never really know what’s happening on the inside. We don’t know what kind of person they are on the inside because we’re only looking at them from the surface.

Judging and trusting someone both carry similarities. Unfortunately, usually we can’t trust someone willingly without judging them first for that matter. It’s not that easy to trust someone and we have our personal reasons for not trusting them because we don’t know who to trust.

“Don’t judge a book by it’s cover” – George Eliot

Considering what Eliot said, judging a book can be compared to judging a person.

We have our reasons for judging, but that doesn’t mean we should do it. People don’t listen most of the time and we rarely show any kindness to others. We get told by so many people to be kind to others, but we don’t listen. Of course as teenagers we don’t understand the concept of being kind to others and to show empathy to others. The only people teenagers would care about would be the ones they’ll show empathy too.

Even though judging someone based on how they look or act is rude, I think there can be a reason. When we’re at school, home, or out with friends and going places with family, our parents are constantly looking around.

It may be weird, but what’s the worst that can happen? We may understand now that we’re older because we see it ourselves, it’s to check that we’re safe, check how long we can stay, constantly checking and seeing if anything suspicious is happening. Our parents are always on high alert in places that they know is suspicious.

In Santa Clarita Valley, it’s sort of safe. It may not be as crowded as it is in Los Angeles or the valley like San Fernando. But even here where we live, our parents are constantly looking around. We may start to pick up that habit too so then we start looking. And when one of our friends decides to hang out we hope that we’re in a group so we feel safer.

When we’re looking around and we notice something out of the blue we analyze that person very harshly, we don’t know anything about them but in our perspective we’re trying to figure out if we’re safe. That person could just be living their life, maybe have mental health issues or maybe doing drugs. But we don’t know. We’re looking out for our safety and what’s in front of us.

Judging- to form an opinion or conclusion about something.

According to this, “Our brains are wired to make automatic judgments about others’ behavior so that we can move through the world without spending much time or energy in understanding everything we see.” says Visweswaran Balasubramanian, in his article The Real Reason we Judge Other People (& What it Says about Us). Visweswaran Balasubramanian also mentions, “Our binary view of the world around us necessitates us to be either right or wrong, so we tend to judge.” In other words, our brains’ reactions are based on our perspective of the world and have us view something in a good or bad way.

One of the reasons for being judgmental with others is the fact that we try to trust people. Clinical psychologist Seth J. Gillihan responded that “It harms our relationships. When people know you’re judgmental, it puts up a barrier between you and them. They may be afraid to reveal things about themselves out of fear that you’ll judge them or badmouth them to other people”(Judging Others Hurts You – WebMD Blogs).

The concept of judgment connects to many things and each reason connects to even bigger reasons why or not to judge a person. In this big spider web there’s a reason for everything. However, we should bring our judgment levels down more often. We may not be able to trust people as soon as we meet them. We may also not be able to control our parents from protecting us when we’re outside. However there are some things that we can control. People say that giving an act of kindness goes a long way and can change someone else’s day. This may be true because we don’t know what people think or experience.

We judge anything and everything for very little reason. But we can’t let that stop us from controlling ourselves and becoming a judgemental person. In most cases it’s acceptable to judge because sometimes there are weirdos lurking around when we go places. It’s not our fault for acting this way but it’s the way things are. We can choose to be a judgemental person or be kind to a certain amount of people.