You Were a Loser in My Moment

I was at Lowe's today getting a key duplicated. I handed the guy my key -- it has a little leather sheath over the head, but the entire shank, the part that actually goes into a lock and the part a key machine needs to read, was completely exposed. He looked at it and told me he couldn't duplicate it because of the cover. I knew he could. I didn't want to take the cover off, so I took the key back and said I'd just do it myself in the machine. And almost immediately, in my head, I labeled him. Loser. Bad attitude.

This happened about two weeks after I quit Home Depot, in no small part because I'd become exhausted by a collection of little annoyances there, so perhaps my tolerance for unnecessary human friction is particularly low right now. But afterward I caught myself. 

Damn, I'm judgmental.

The strange thing is that shortly before this happened, I'd been thinking about whether other people actually judge us as much as we imagine they do. There's a comforting thing we get told when we're worried about what other people think: nobody cares, everybody is too busy thinking about themselves. And I think that's mostly true. Except when it isn't.

Because I didn't care about the guy at Lowe's. I didn't know he existed ten minutes before I met him. I don't know his name, where he lives, whether he has children, whether he loves his job or hates it (though his attitude might be a clue), whether he's brilliant at something I've never attempted. I don't know if he'd been working for nine hours or had just clocked in. I don't know if his mother died yesterday. I knew one thing about him: he wouldn't duplicate my key. And for approximately twenty seconds, I thought he was a loser.

The People Who Don't Give a Shit

I think I've misunderstood something about judgment for a long time. There aren't two kinds of people in the world, the ones who judge us and the ones who don't.

We're all both.

Think about the people you encountered today -- dozens of them, maybe hundreds. The woman in the car beside you at the light, the guy walking through the parking lot, the cashier three registers over, someone standing outside a restaurant, the person who passed you going the other direction in an aisle. You didn't judge most of them. You genuinely didn't give a shit, and not maliciously either. They simply never became significant enough in your experience to require an opinion.

And then somebody cuts you off, and now you have an opinion. Someone holds the door when your hands are full, and now you have an opinion. Someone talks down to a cashier. Someone notices you dropped something and runs twenty feet to give it back. Someone refuses to duplicate a perfectly duplicatable key. For a moment, that person stops being scenery and becomes a character. And we are remarkably fast writers.

Twenty Seconds of Evidence

Here's the uncomfortable part. I still think the Lowe's guy could have duplicated the key. This isn't one of those stories where I discover that I was wrong and learn a heartwarming lesson about giving everyone the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he had some store rule I didn't know about. Maybe he didn't. I still think he was being unnecessarily difficult.

The lesson isn't that my observation was wrong. It's how much I built on top of it. He didn't want to duplicate my key, therefore he has a bad attitude, therefore he's lazy, therefore he's a loser. Look how quickly we can get from an action to an identity.

We do this constantly. He's not a person who did something stupid, he's stupid. She's not a person who behaved selfishly, she's selfish. He's not somebody who failed at something, he's a failure. She's not somebody who said something awkward, she's weird.

And maybe sometimes those judgments are even directionally correct, which is what makes this difficult. Human beings aren't completely terrible at reading each other, and sometimes you really do encounter an asshole. But there's an enormous difference between accurately describing the piece of somebody you encountered and believing you've discovered the whole person.

I think I've found language for that distinction. He was a loser in my moment.

In My Moment

That's not a particularly charitable sentence, but I think it's an honest one. In the tiny intersection between his life and mine, that's what he was to me. Somebody unhelpful, somebody who seemed to have an attitude, somebody who turned an extremely simple transaction into an unnecessary annoyance. Loser. In my moment.

Those last three words are doing all the work. Because somewhere else he might be the guy who stays late when a coworker's kid is sick. Maybe he's the funniest person in his family, or he's rebuilding a motorcycle in his garage, or his dog loses its mind when his truck pulls into the driveway. Maybe he's an absolutely  spectacular father. Or maybe he's an asshole everywhere he goes. I have no idea, and that's the point. I only own my moment with him.

And Other People Only Own Their Moment With Me

This is where the whole thing turned around on me, because I've spent an enormous amount of my life worrying about what other people think of me. They might be doing exactly what I did at Lowe's. Maybe somebody has met me when I was frustrated and decided I was an asshole. Maybe somebody has seen one part of my career and decided I was unsuccessful, or watched me abandon something and decided I can't finish anything, or seen me struggling and decided I'm a loser.

And perhaps, in their moment, I was. That's a very different proposition from saying they're right about me.

Because I know how little I knew about the guy at Lowe's when I reached my verdict. I had twenty seconds of evidence, and it felt like enough. That's the part we forget when we're on the receiving end of judgment. We imagine that somebody else's opinion of us represents an outside, objective assessment -- they can see us from a distance, therefore perhaps they can see something we can't. But distance doesn't necessarily provide perspective. Sometimes distance just means missing information. The person judging you may have one frame from a two-hour movie, and they're reviewing the film.

We Are All Cameos in Other People's Lives

Maybe that's what strangers mostly are. Cameos. You enter somebody else's story for thirty seconds, you say something, you do something, they interpret it, and then you're gone.

In one person's story you're the incredibly nice guy who helped carry something to her car. In another you're the asshole who didn't let him merge. In another you're the funny stranger in line, or the idiot who couldn't figure out the parking meter, or barely there at all. And every one of those people technically met the same person. You. None of them got enough of you to know you.

I didn't get enough of the Lowe's guy to know him either. I got enough to know I didn't like him in my moment, and maybe that's okay.

We don't have to abolish judgment, and I don't think we could if we tried. Judgment is part of navigating other human beings. We notice behavior, we evaluate it, we decide what we like, what we dislike, whom we trust, whom we avoid, whom we want to see again. But perhaps we could stop confusing our moment with someone for possession of the whole story.

Because if I can reduce a man to "loser" after twenty seconds at a key machine, somebody else can certainly do it to me. And they probably have.

The good news is that they knew about as much about me as I knew about him.