Why People Who Constantly Judge Speak From Resentment
One of the aspects of today’s society is that we now have more means to observe each other. The Internet and social networks have meant that there is a lot of information published about each person and it has made it very easy to know bits and pieces of people we have never even spoken to.
Most people have learned to adapt to this change by trying to use it to their advantage: that is, seeing it as an opportunity to reach more people, expand friendships or look for job and business options. Regardless of whether we want to use this type of tools, the option is there, and in any case, it is not intended to harm anyone: just to improve oneself in some aspect through the way we relate to others.
However, there are those who see social relations from an opposite perspective. Instead of taking advantage of the many ways to connect with others that the present offers us, they prefer to spend a good part of their free time expressing negative attitudes about the people around them. These are people who constantly judge and criticize others and systematic. In this article we will talk about why they act this way and how we can learn from them about how not to approach our personal relationships.
Let’s start with the basics: how to recognize people in everyday life who are always criticizing others? Among the characteristics and habits that define them, the most typical are the following (they do not occur all at once in all cases, obviously).
It may sound contradictory, but the habit of always judging others can serve to establish informal links between people Bonds that are similar to friendship.
How does this happen? On the one hand, always going against others but at the same time having dealings with a person conveys the idea that that person is better than the vast majority. By default, the fact that someone who always criticizes others tolerates our presence and even seems to enjoy it can make us feel good.
On the other hand, the fact of meaning judged by someone close to us, added to the above, makes that we believe that that person who always criticizes can help us detect our weaknesses, which will make it easier to defeat them. The reasoning is this: others don’t have the opportunity to have someone nearby who is correcting them, but we do, so we must be privileged.
Something that indicates that this is a subtle form of manipulation is the fact that although derogatory comments or attempts at ridicule are frequent (which are supposed to help us recognize our own failures), the idea that The person who throws those daggers at us will also help us overcome those supposed imperfections.
2. They are unable to focus a discussion on the arguments
When it comes to arguing constructively about a topic, people who are used to judging tend to direct your comments toward negative characteristics that the opponent supposedly presents as a person: the ad hominem fallacy is their downfall, even if they were initially defending the correct option.
A risky style, an action that deviates slightly from social conventions or an opinion that simply does not coincide with one’s own. They are reasons for ridicule or being used to “read the mind” of that person and attribute all kinds of intelligence or personality imperfections.
These comments may be more or less witty depending on the case, but what is clear is that they are irrelevant and talk about very irrelevant characteristics or facts.
4. On social networks, little subtlety criticizing
On the Internet, people who habitually judge others they feel they have the extra protection of anonymity, so they take the opportunity to unleash their cruelty. This means that they leave all kinds of derogatory comments, visible to everyone, knowing that the negative impact of this type of publication is more noticeable: everyone can know who is the target of the criticism, but it is not very clear. who issues them.
Furthermore, since the Internet is usually a place where avoiding a rational discussion or debate does not have a high cost (unlike a face-to-face dialogue, in which it is always clear who wants to stop intervening) these criticisms are simple and not very sophisticated, since they do not have to give rise to an exchange of opinions. They are little more than insults that are extended through several words placed to form a phrase.
Why do they criticize so much?
There are many reasons that can lead a person to constantly criticize others, but several of them are especially common. The main one is that judging another in a superficial way is an easy and simple way to feel superior to someone and, by comparison, feeling better about yourself.
When one of these people formulates a thought aimed at bringing another person down (either by saying it out loud or keeping it to himself), he is actually trying to temporarily escape the ruin that is his own self-esteem.
The most negative thing about these people is not what happens when they think in negative or degrading terms about someone else, since these kinds of ideas are so simple and poorly elaborated that no one has to take them seriously. The most negative thing is what is happening during the rest of the time in your own mind, i.e. the reign of a resentment that totally subjugates self-esteem
In the same way that those who think obsessively about an idea that causes them anxiety desperately try to seek distractions, such as binge eating, drug use or even cuts on the skin, there are those who try to rescue their self-image for a while. brief moment creating the fiction that one is far above someone else.
That is why, in a time in which the fight of egos is the order of the day, it is important not to take as normal those outbursts of contempt towards others with which some people try to be noticed before others and before themselves. Whoever needs to throw darts at others to stay afloat is clearly showing that he has nothing to offer and that he can only ask for help.
