On Other People’s Business

Dearest Reader,

It is a curious habit of modern society to concern itself endlessly with the lives of others while remaining remarkably unwilling to examine its own condition.

People speak with great confidence about what strangers ought to be doing — how they should dress, parent, age, earn, heal, grieve, rest, succeed, or recover. Entire afternoons are spent discussing the choices of people they neither know nor understand, as though unsolicited opinion were a form of public service.

One suspects it is often something else entirely.

There is comfort, I think, in directing attention outward. It spares a person from the rather more difficult task of sitting quietly with themselves. Criticism can be a wonderfully effective distraction from self-awareness. One may spend years correcting the lives of others while avoiding even a brief inventory of one’s own bitterness, dishonesty, envy, or dissatisfaction.

Society rarely discourages this arrangement. In fact, it rewards it splendidly.

The loudest judgments are often mistaken for wisdom. Interference is reframed as concern. Constant commentary becomes personality. Meanwhile, genuine introspection — the slow and occasionally uncomfortable practice of asking oneself difficult questions — is treated as optional, if it is considered at all.

This is unfortunate.

Most people would benefit far more from tending their own lives than from managing everyone else’s from a distance. One’s energy is finite. Spending it cataloguing the perceived failures of strangers is not, generally speaking, the highest use of it.

There is also the matter of peace.

Few things disturb a person more thoroughly than constant involvement in affairs that were never theirs to carry. Opinions accumulate. Irritations multiply. The mind grows noisy from maintaining judgments it was never asked to hold.

A quieter life often begins the moment one stops treating every passing circumstance as a personal assignment.

Not everything requires commentary.
Not every difference requires correction.
And not every life is asking for an audience.

Yours most sincerely,
Lady Staywell