Live with criticism, learn to condemn
At my mom’s house she has an old framed print of the poem Children Learn What They Live by Dorothy Nolte. There are variations of it, but the first line is essentially:
If children live with criticism, they learn to condemn.
I was staring at that and thinking of social media. Is it any wonder that we are so frustrated all the time, when all day we are living with everyone else’s outrage in our social timelines? We mimic what we see.
Still, it’s true that these are difficult times for many people. There are reasons to be sad, or upset, or fearful. Social media tends to exaggerate, blowing things up into such outsized grievances that we can’t tell the difference between smaller concerns and critical ones.
And never-ending personal attacks. What even is a personal attack? It’s when we see a problem, and instead of acting in good faith to address a mistake someone may have made, we go after the person instead. We question their motives or integrity.
More often we should instead separate the problem from the person. Let’s start by assuming that nearly everyone is trying their best and has good intentions. Now they don’t need to change, because we’ve changed. And we’ll likely feel better for it, focused on solving problems instead of creating new ones.
