Avoid being critical.
This is a disease of adults, generally. It’s rare that you find a kid that can pick things apart and tell you what is wrong about everything. Why? They simply haven’t learned to do this yet, and I think this is why kids are generally happier.
The need to be critical seems to come to us in a few ways. We either learn it through work or through our parents. Sometimes we learn it from our peers as a way to separate ourselves from other people. The latter is a kind of ego building program we use to help us feel superior by comparison.
Don’t fall into this trap. If you learn to be critical all the time in every situation, you’ll find that it’s very difficult to ever be happy. You will create a psychological prison. The bars of this prison will be your standards for what is “good”. The only key will be your ability to let go.
When you are critical of everything, a couple of things will happen. First and foremost, you’ll have problems making and keeping friends. Even if you aren’t critical of your friends, you are still spouting out negativity, and most people can get all the negativity they need just by watching the local headline news. Besides, if you’re critical enough, your friends will think you’ll turn that critical focus on them as soon as they are out of your company.
The worst thing that happens when you are critical is you set yourself apart from what is “good”. You’ll start to say things like this: “I would have had a great time if they hadn’t overcooked the burgers.” You actually create a buffer between you and being happy. Here’s the thing: Happiness is ephemeral. No one can really tell you where or when it will strike. It can pop up at the oddest times and the most bizarre places. It may not happen when you think it should, and it will rarely happen because a certain set of conditions that exist in your mind have been satisfied. Happiness is not like a chemistry project where you add in a bunch of ingredients (good service, good food, well behaved kids, etc.) and get a great big smiley face.
I like to remind people who are hypercritical that they can use that same critical function to get in a better frame of mind. All they have to do is change their focus to figure out what is good about something. Imagine this, if you will. A person spends his whole day focusing on what is good. Like a detective, you learn to search out the good in everything. Why? Because if all you ever focus on is the negative, the world isn’t going to seem like a very good place (Hey, I never said this was rocket science). But if you can focus on what is good, you’ll find that, more and more, the elusive entity known as happiness will start to visit more often, as will your friends.
The arena where this rule is most important is how it applies to other people. There is rarely a good reason to be critical of another human being for one reason: You can never know everything about another person, so you are in no position to judge them. You’re probably wondering how a psychiatrist can say you can’t know everything about another person. Well, I mean just that. I’ve seen people in therapy for years and still learned new things about them regularly. The only way that you can truly know another person is to know all their hopes and dreams, all their traumas and losses, and all their pains, physical and emotional. Do you see what I’m getting at here? The only way you can ever truly know another person is to be that person, and we can never criticize that which we don’t truly understand.
The ability to be critical is not evil. It definitely serves a purpose. But in the world today, it seems that being critical has become like a social sport. Unfortunately, it’s a sport that always hurts at least one party, and frequently hurts everyone involved.
