No longer orienting to the world as "bad"

I’ve noticed I don’t often orient to the world as certain things being “bad” anymore. I tend to either deconstruct them into their constituent parts or look at the implications. (Circling has been one of the largest contributors to this!)

The other day a female friend revealed that they had dated a male mid-thirty-year-old when they were 20. They presented it as something they felt shameful for.

In the process of searching within myself for whether I considered this “bad,” I found myself mostly thinking that they probably had a good reason for doing this and that it made sense to them at the time.

And then I considered the other direction (what if my friend had told me the reverse?) to see if I had a gender bias.

I found myself mostly thinking about what that would imply about my friend such that they were dating significantly younger people and that I would want to get curious about their motivations.

However, neither of these thought processes seemed like I was searching for the answer to whether to label it as bad.

Which is great! At first, I thought I was failing to fully consider the situation since I couldn’t make a determination about it being bad or not. And now upon further reflection, I actually consider that a feature/a good thing!

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we, as a culture, label things as bad and then try to excise them (in ourselves, in our social group, in our larger culture, etc) and often use “controlling”/managing tactics to do so, such as shame, blame, and victimizing.

I like noticing that I moralize less, have more capacity to hold more perspectives, and instead have more nuance to my view of the world.