A recent event has caused me to remember the good ol’ “don’t knock it till you try it.”

It’s of course within human nature to form judgements on virtually everything, but the important thing is to learn how to reserve them when we need to. And often we find that we need to. In this day and age, it seems to have become somewhat of a trend to place our judgement on everything, both online and in real life. However, though we may not realize it immediately, we just as frequently place our judgement on things we don’t really have reason to.

In so many instances, we find it necessary to put in our two cents on something that we really only have surface knowledge on. Often times, it’s simply bandwagoning on mere hearsay. The number of times I’ve heard and seen people mentioning how a certain show or book is horrible, regurgitating very similar opinions to each other, and this is mainly due to the simple fact that they have not tried it themselves. It’s not simply negative regurgitation. There are just as many times when people throw around their compliments for something without much of anything to back it up. They generalize their compliments, and it comes out shallow. Such overgeneralized judgements easily lead to an overhype.

Instead, we need to learn how to form judgements for ourselves. You heard good things or bad things about a show? Maybe try watching it for yourself before absorbing those judgements as your own. No one’s asking you to read the whole 400-page book or watch the first season of a new series. Not even a full episode. Just enough for you to develop your own opinion.

I wish I had followed that advice a while back when I formed a judgement off of a 15-second advertisement of a show, not nearly enough to really get an idea of its actual premise. When choosing between two shows that I swore I would not like, I picked the 15-second show as the lesser of two evils. And after binge-watching 13 episodes in two nights (when I should have been doing homework, oops), I’ve found myself demanding a second season. This unexpected surprise caused me to try an episode of the other of the two evils. While my judgement was unfortunately proved correct, it was still worth it for me to try it to actually form that solid judgement.

Don’t knock it till you try it.