Social media makes us judge others harshly

There are times when some women, probably in their quest to brag to the masses about what God’s warriors they are, open a window into their marriages and give us a glimpse of how useless their husbands are that they can’t even be trusted to go to the shops and buy something as simple as a dishwasher.

These women take to social media to show the rest of the world just how after marriage, their husbands had regressed to the infant stages.

I would watch with absolute horror as these women would tell all and sundry how they sent their husbands to the shops with pictures of the exact things they were supposed to get but still returned with incorrect items.

How those wives thought those embarrassing displays of weaponised incompetence were cute always baffled me.

Weaponised incompetence has been defined as a form of passive-aggressive behaviour where an individual deliberately performs tasks poorly or pretends to be incapable of completing certain tasks.

It has also been found that people use weaponised incompetence to avoid responsibility, such as husbands buying the wrong groceries despite being given pictures of the items, therefore forcing their wives to take over and perform the tasks instead.

However, it recently dawned on me that while I have been repulsed by those horrifying levels of weaponised incompetence these husbands display, I’m really no better than those men.

While mine can’t be defined as weaponised incompetence because I am not deliberately doing any task badly so it can be taken over by someone else, the truth is that for years now there have been things I stopped bothering myself with because I know someone else can do them better.

Take cooking for example.

I have never liked cooking. It has never come naturally to me and having to cook has always given me anxiety because of the disappointment I think my food will bring to those eating it. So, I have always avoided it. 

However, the day I realised that not only do my brothers know how to cook but they do it so well and enjoy it, was the day I stopped bothering all together with cooking.

I don’t know how many years it has been but when I’m home in Mahikeng, North West, I never pretend that I can cook and that is not even something anyone expects of me.

We have an understanding that I leave cooking to the experts.

This habit of leaving chores to those I believe to be more capable than me has even extended to my household where there are some things I don’t bother myself with.

I don’t know about the intricacies of DStv.

Apparently, if you are watching a particular show at a certain time that overlaps with another one you want to watch, you can ensure that you don’t miss out by watching the one you missed later by pressing some buttons and watching it even two hours later.

I don’t really care about knowing such stuff and I believe that if my son can do it, there is no reason to worry about learning that.

Sometimes when I want to watch Showmax or Netflix, I get a message on the TV screen saying I need to enter a particular code before watching... I have never bothered to find how to get that code but my son does.

He knows my phone pin and even added his fingerprint to it so he can unlock it (I didn’t even know this was possible until I saw him unlock my phone with his fingerprints when he needed to retrieve something from it).

Also, it is only recently that I learnt my house’s Wi-Fi code because as long as my son knew it, there was no reason for me to.

So, after years of shaking my head at these supposedly useless men who leave everything to their wives, I have now realised that I have no business turning my nose up at them when we are birds of a feather, albeit in different degrees.

At least with them their wives still have hope that one day they will return home with the correct items from the shops, hence they still take chances and send them there.

With me, everyone gave up long ago. No one expects me to wake up one day and prepare a seven-colour meal, except my poor son – he lives in hope.

I can just imagine the shock and horror if my family came back from their errands and found that I cooked.

My son will probably eat, I mean, that’s all he knows because we live together. He will just be so happy to have something to keep hunger at bay because he is the same person who from a young age told me that the food I cook is not for enjoyment but nourishment, just so we don’t starve.

The others, however, will probably say they are full.

However, what I learnt from this lightbulb moment is that social media has made us judge other people harshly, although some really deserve it, without looking at ourselves because we may be just like the people we are criticising, if not worse.

The only difference is that we don’t have social media accounts that amplify our flaws. We just acknowledge them privately.