We were taught a foundational rule in kindergarten: If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it. But since then, it’s been forgotten.
A couple announces a relationship and strangers suddenly start running compatibility tests. Someone changes their appearance and suddenly everyone has a theory why. A person posts a photo and strangers decide what needs to change. Any choice a person makes about their own life becomes an invitation for judgment.
People are criticized for being too fat and then for losing weight. They are judged for the color of their skin, something they were born with and had absolutely no say in. And sometimes this moves past simple “judgment” with very real implications: Same-sex marriage was only legalized in the United States in 2015, meaning who a person loved was considered a legitimate public concern serious enough to criminalize. It was legal to fire someone for being gay up until 2020. Less than 60 years ago, interracial marriage was still illegal in parts of the country. Women couldn’t open a bank account without a husband’s signature until 1974. Until 1993, marital rape wasn’t recognized as a crime in all 50 states, meaning a person’s body was considered less their own once they had a spouse. Each of these instances was caused by someone, somewhere, deciding that another person’s simple existence was their problem to solve.
What is the problem? Who is being threatened? Someone else’s relationship, someone else’s body and identity. None of it reaches across the room and affects you. The energy it takes to organize that much negativity around someone else’s existence, to legislate it and comment on it—I can’t wrap my head around where that comes from or what positive effect, if any, it has on the person behind it.
What makes it worse is that most of it isn’t malicious. There’s a societal obligation we’ve created where staying quiet means indifference, which is apparently the worst thing a person can have. Everyone says something about everything all the time, as if access to someone’s life qualifies you to have an opinion on it. The loudest, most opinionated person in the room is not the most engaged and caring. But really they’re just loud.
We’ve been told that nobody cares enough. I don’t think that’s ever been true. If anything, people care too much: about what strangers eat, who they love, how they live. Though “care” is a generous word for most of it, because genuine care implies investment in the other person’s well-being. Most of this isn’t that.
We were taught better than this before we knew almost anything else. A classroom of 5-year-olds had a better grasp on this than most adults today: If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. The world does not need more people with more things to say about lives they aren’t living. Minding your own business is not a difficult or radical idea; we just forgot it was one worth applying.
