How much time and energy do you spend judging others?

Today, a friend of mine shared an entertaining photo of someone at the gym taking a selfie of herself making a “what the fuck?” face, and, more importantly, of someone behind her (face hidden) wearing - for lack of a better description - an amazing piece of full-body spandex:

I cannot include the specific photo here as it would only serve to diminish the point I will be trying to make, so I hope this description suffices.

This silly photo triggered something in me that I want to analyze, and explain why I had such a visceral reaction to such a harmless activity, and that requires a little background.

I’m a fat guy. Being a fat guy in society means being constantly subjected to the judgment of others, whether it’s subtle or overt. Diet culture screams at us, every day, that we are failures, and that we can overcome our personal failings if we simply adapt the fad diet or exercise routine of the week, while airplanes and movie theaters shove us into seats that virtually guarantee our temporary neighbors will come away angry at the very existence of fat people.

This post isn’t really about that, but more to set the stage for the reality in which I exist in. In the process of accepting myself as a fat person, I’ve come to pay more attention to the amount of time and energy humans spend judging other humans for choices that impact no one but themselves, and I’m still coming to terms with what exactly that means, but so far I’ve decided on:

Wow, what a waste of time and energy
There’s so much negativity in the world, and I want to do my best not to add to it

On the second point - this post is not to shame anyone who spends their time and energy judging friends or strangers. Lord knows I still do it, as I’m both still growing as a person, and I’m also a professional hypocrite. But I do think people should more often stop and ask themselves: why am I spending my time and energy talking about this? what am I putting out into the world?

To bring it back to the topic of the photo: does this really hurt anyone? Probably not. It’s even likely it was staged, and as a friend pointed out, someone wearing that outfit is probably not opposed to attention. For the sake of the rest of this argument, we’ll assume it was a photo taken of a stranger to mock them - because even if this specific photo wasn’t that, there are likely thousands, if not millions, of examples of photos where that was very much the intent.

Reflecting on my reaction to the photo reminded me of something Maintenance Phase host Aubrey Gordon was discussing once, which is, to paraphrase - “every fat person lives in fear that they will show up in some generic B-roll footage of fat people being played in the background of a news report about the ‘obesity epidemic’.” It doesn’t matter if your face is hidden if you recognize your own body, being presented as a subject for mockery.

Sure, the person in this photo, or similar photos, isn’t identified. No one is getting publicly doxed with their name attached. But what about the off-chance that the person sees it, and is hurt by the mockery - mockery so widespread it went from a gym in god-knows-where to a random Discord with a few friends in it. Is the possibility of hurting someone worth putting this out into the world? What’s the math equation that makes the risk acceptable?

I’m not going to say I constantly live in fear of people taking photos of me, a fat person, and sharing them around the internet, only for me to stumble across it some day and realize I’ve been mocked by thousands or even millions of random strangers. But the mockery of fat people is so prevalent, and worse, so accepted, that it’s also far from impossible. This is the reality in which I observe and reflect on behavior like this.

I do not think the person who took this photo is a bad person, and I certainly don’t think anyone sharing it is bad, either. There’s nothing about this specific photo that’s worth the time and energy I put into writing this, but I did feel like my own over-the-top reaction to it was worth analyzing and writing about, especially since this is something I’ve had in the back of my mind for months, is something I’m very much still working on, and is certainly also a topic I’ll return to.

If you take anything away from this, I’d ask you to pause, take a moment, and reflect before you say or share something negative about someone else - stranger or otherwise - and during that pause, ask yourself if the other person’s actions really impact you or others in any way, if it’s really worth the energy you’re about to spend, and how they would feel if they heard it.