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It's the 10% Happier podcast.

I'm Dan Harris.

Hey, hey, how we doing, everybody?

I have this vivid memory of being on a beach vacation with a bunch of friends many years ago when I was first getting interested in meditation.

I was lounging and reading a book about Buddhism.

And one of my friends spotted it and remarked that he could never do Buddhism or meditation because he was a comedy writer, still is actually, and he needs to retain his capacity to be judgmental.

There's so much to unpack in that comment. I mean, I wish that

meditation uprooted my own capacity to be judgmental. I wish the technology was that effective.

But anyway, I think the real misunderstanding here is that there's somehow a lot of value to being

judgmental. I think that confuses discernment with judgmentalism. And if anything, I think mindfulness or clear

seeing or self-awareness, that makes you better able to discern the kind of details that might make

good comedy or help you make better decisions instead of being judgmental, which I think is a state

of mind that is, in my experience,

quite painful. If you're mindful, you might see that judgmentalism carries a valence of ill-will

or hatred or superiority, none of which actually feel good, again, if you're paying attention.

And of course, many, if not most of us, spend most of our judgmental energy not on other people,

but on ourselves,

nitpicking every decision, second guessing compulsively. As a friend of mine once joked,

if anybody said to him the kinds of things his inner narrator said to him, he would punch

that other person in the face. And yet many of us deeply believe that we need to liberally apply

...