8 Ways Backbiting Can Ruin Your Life
Genuine reasons to eliminate this dirty habit
Backbiting is one of the hardest things to avoid in life. It’s that sneaky house fly that finds its way into many conversations and contaminates everything it touches.
It’s something we all do to an extent. It may appear harmless and can often be very subtle, but there are plenty of reasons to cut it out of our lives completely.
If you’re like me and want to avoid backbiting like the plague that it is, here are 8 things to help convince you to stop.
1. It’s a waste of time
The odds of you existing were basically zero, yet here you are. We are the most intelligent species in the known universe with infinite potential and capacity, yet we often spend a lot of our time talking bad about others.
There is honestly no benefit to backbiting. Warning someone about a potential threat is fine. Sharing your personal experiences that involve someone else could also be valid. But spending your time saying negative things about someone else is simply unproductive and the worst use of your precious time.
2. It exposes your flaws
“Strong minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, weak minds discuss people. — Socrates
Backbiting actually shows others more about you than the person you are trying to expose. When you magnify other people’s faults, your own flaws and insecurities tend to come to the surface.
We like to put negative attention on other people’s problems because those points of judgment reflect the areas that we are insecure about. Unfortunately, by bringing other people’s problems to light, we unknowingly highlight the very flaws in ourselves that we hope to hide.
3. It causes disunity
One of the biggest problems in the entire world is a lack of unity. If humanity were truly united, there would be no wars, no injustice, no oppression, no inequality, and the list goes on. Large scale unity starts at the grassroots, with families, neighborhoods, and circles of friends loving and caring for each other.
Backbiting is one of the biggest sources of disunity. When you speak ill of someone behind their back, you influence how other people perceive them. Whether true or not, focusing on other people’s faults creates a sense of judgment and negativity towards them and can harm the way others interact with them.
How are we to build a world founded on love, kindness, and unity, when there is so much toxicity in our conversations?
4. It could come to bite you
This ties in with disunity, but an additional reason not to backbite is that words have a tendency to travel. People love to gossip. Drama and juicy news, especially at the expense of others, spread like wildfire and the source of it all is usually traceable back to you.
When backbiting becomes a habit, you forget who you are talking to. There is a heightened chance of your words reaching the victim. Whether that results in you being confronted, or you simply hurting the heart of another, you don’t want such negativity to be tied to your words.
When what you say can be so impactful, why not use your words for positivity and attract good karma instead?
5. Gives you a false sense of superiority
“The people who actively find faults in others are the same people who are completely blind to their own.” — Kristen Butler
By bringing someone else down, you subconsciously put yourself above them. Because they did something wrong, acknowledging their faults makes you feel superior. Because you aren’t like them right?
It’s a dangerous game to play. You don’t build yourself up by tearing others down. You’re still in the same place. You’re just trying to convince yourself otherwise by downward comparison. The more you make yourself feel better by highlighting what’s wrong with other people, the more deluded you get about your own character.
Speaking of…
6. You spend less time fixing your own issues
When you focus on other people, you forget yourself. That’s great in service or when putting others first. But when it comes to things like comparison and fault finding, you couldn’t be doing anything worse for yourself.
The more you concentrate on what other people are doing, the less time you spend on knowing and understanding yourself. Why backbite when you have 1000 things you could improve on yourself? Every moment spent talking badly about someone else is a moment you could have spent on self-reflection and personal growth. If you don’t fix your own issues and neglect your own progress, how silly would it be to spend time faulting someone else?
7. People won’t trust you
Years ago when I joined a new high school, I remember sitting in the cafeteria, a few seats away from a bunch of girls who seemed to be close friends. They kept complimenting each other and giving each other hugs and stuff. Then one of the girls had to go, so there were a few goodbyes and ‘love yous’. The moment she was out of earshot, one of the girls rolled her eyes and said ‘jeez her shoes are so tacky’.
I found it difficult to sincerely trust anyone in the school after that. How could you be all happy and nice with someone and then start trashing them the moment they walked away? Were people doing this to me too?
Even if you backbite to your closest friends, it says a lot about your character. Those closest to you may understand you, but there is a part of you that remains untrustworthy. How do you know someone who judges others isn’t doing the same thing to you when you aren’t there?
8. It destroys your soul
“Backbiting quencheth the light of the heart, and extinguisheth the life of the soul.” — Bahá’u’lláh
Backbiting is rooted in negative feelings toward others. It may seem logical then, that you want to get these feelings off your chest, just like a cathartic rant about traffic or a bad day. But when you judge and fault others, regardless of how much you enjoy the process, all you’re doing is amplifying those toxic feelings inside you.
The more they stir within you, the more damaging they can be to your soul and wellbeing. If you dislike someone or find fault in what they do, it’s better to ask yourself why you are so affected or why you feel the need to bring these up in front of others. Self-awareness along with genuine humility keeps you from building up all that toxicity inside you.
To recap:
- Waste of time
- Exposes YOUR flaws
- Causes disunity
- Karma
- Falsely makes you feel better about yourself
- You forget to fix your own problems
- People stop trusting you
- Your soul suffers
I won’t claim to have eradicated all traces of backbiting from my life. It’s a tough toxin to get rid of and is something that preys on our deepest flaws and insecurities.
But consciously eliminating negative talk, especially about others behind their backs, is something I’m working on and feel is crucial to everyone’s spiritual and moral growth.
In the absence of backbiting, there are so many positive things we could infuse in our conversations that would really build connections and feelings of unity amongst each other. Let’s only do those.