Sheltered.

So often in our lives we meet people who lead vastly different lives than our own. Sometimes we cannot even begin to fathom how they could make choices so opposite from ours.

How can someone like that hip-hop shit, it's all gangster and crass unintelligible curses. They must be violent brainless thugs 

How can someone enjoy reading thick books with tiny fonts? They must be loners with no life.

It's so easy to discard someone's way of life if you define them by views you don't agree with. Most of the times it's not malicious intent intended to dehumanize them. It's just how you look at the world. And there's no other way, so how could you be wrong, and they be right.

If someone eats meat, they must be cruel stone-cold beings who don't cherish animal life. Without thinking that nature isn't kind or forgiving. We don't protest tigers eating deers, But humans depending on other animals at the lower factions of the food chain is somehow unusually brutal and unforgiving.

And then there are people who are vegetarian. It feels like just their choice of not partaking in killing of animals for food makes them condescending. Like they're standing on an obnoxious morally superior high ground judging you silently. But why should someone's personal choice of nutrition affect you. Humans grew sentience after thousands of yers of evolution, why not utilize that freedom of decision making.

But we forget that life is very rigid and dull this way, a linear construct of our own values and morals imposed on ourselves as well as strangers. All 7 billion of them. You don't have to agree or condone someone's life choice to be with them.
Their varying political beliefs don't make them bad humans with whom the very idea of maintaining a friendship is unimaginable. Judging others is human nature, and it comes so easily to us. But making others act on your judgment is not only ignorant, it also intolerent.



We live in a time where interacting with anyone from anywhere is instantaneous. And yet we try to live in our own little bubbles of safety. Someone expressed a view on Facebook you disagree with? Unfriend. A Youtuber says something you find controversial? Unsubscribe. It's very easy to close our eyes, put fingers on our ears and yell LALALALA till everything contrarian goes silent.
And by the end of it, we're left with a closed room full of people circle-jerking each other.

It's very important to expose ourselves to conflicting views. Beliefs that challenge us, ones that make us think about the things about ourselves we've never wondered about. If we think about why do we judge the people we see the way we do. Often times we'll find the answer says more about us than those selected few.

This is why in these times of a rapidly progressing world, we need to experience all the differing beliefs and broaden our minds to move out of the rooms that keep us sheltered.