Lately I’ve been thinking about how quickly we judge people without really knowing their “why.” How easy it is to take one moment, one decision, or one label and let that become the whole story, without ever asking what led someone there in the first place.
It probably doesn’t help that we often hear only one side of things. A headline. A clip. A story from a source we’ve always trusted. And if we’re honest, the sources we tend to follow or listen to are usually the ones that already line up with how we see the world. When what we hear fits our existing views, it feels familiar. Comfortable. We don’t really want to believe there’s more to the story, because looking deeper would mean questioning ideas we’ve carried for a long time. And that’s a hard thing to do, especially when those ideas have shaped how we understand the world.
There’s an old phrase about putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. I think we’ve gotten pretty far away from that. Instead, we’re quick to say things like, why would she quit that job, she was making such good money, or why would he leave her, she seemed like such a good person, or why would someone move their family there, where they lived before couldn’t have been that bad, or why did he run away from home, he had such great parents. We take things at face value, fill in the gaps ourselves, and move straight to judgment.
We're quick to treat a broken law, rule, or expectation as a kind of moral permission slip, as if it justifies whatever harm comes next.
But those comments usually say more about how little we know than how much we understand. They skip over the parts we don’t see. The conversations that happened behind closed doors. The fear, the exhaustion, the circumstances that led to a decision that makes no sense to us from the outside.
Understanding someone’s “why” doesn’t excuse everything. But refusing to even ask it makes it far too easy to stop seeing people as human. And I think we can do better than that.
I don’t need to understand someone’s life or choices to love and respect them as a person. But if I’m going to form opinions about why they did what they did, the least I can do is take the time to understand their story.
Understanding has a way of showing up when we slow down enough to listen.