Jerks and Non-Jerks

Nice.

Fat.

Pretty.

Jerk.

Interesting.

Not interesting.

There are hundreds of other categories.

Imagine you are shopping at Cosco. You’re in the store walking along with your little cart. On the left and on the right are massive shelves. You enter the chocolate section and you have boxes of Snickers, Mars and Milky Way from the very bottom reaching all the way up to the rafters. Continue along and you see the drink section, the spice section, the toilet-paper section etc. Our mind with respect to people is often like that: I walk through your mind and I see all the fat people. A little farther along is the shelf with all the nice people. Stuck in some corner shelf are all the jerks. Apparently, we have it all figured out.

I’m no doctor, but I would definitely put some money on the fact that one of the man’s fastest reactions or reflexes is making a judgment about others.

We see or meet a person and immediately notice a dozen or more things: the way they smile, how they dress, their hair style, the words they use and how they say them, their physical appearance etc. That’s all good. It’s almost 100% objective. It’s what we see and there is no interpretation involved.

A person, however, is a universe, an endless maze of feelings, impressions, ideas, convictions, a specific history…. If you look at one aspect of a person, he would fall into one category. But if you look at another, he suddenly doesn’t fit in with the other people in the first category. That kind of makes stocking shelves a little difficult. Wouldn’t you say?

One problem is that we put people in boxes; a greater problem is that we often put them in the wrong boxes. We have to give people time and—to say it metaphorically—space. It’s allright to form an idea about someone, but make sure you’re fair and you take the time to really get to know someone before you label them off as “not interesting”. Good friendships would be a lot more common if we would actually be open to learning how others really are. You may be surprised to see that there are a lot less real jerks out there than you thought.
By David Yep