I listened to the first two episodes of this podcast back to back, and absolutely loved them. This is a show about guilt, shame, and the excuses we make to ourselves when we know we’re doing something wrong. More than that, though, it’s an exploration of how we look back on the bad decisions we’ve made in the past, reconcile them, and try to move past them. As its name suggests, the show doesn’t deal with acts of deliberate malice and cruelty. Rather, it’s about the things we do that are in a moral grey area, where we sort of know our behavior is wrong but we find a way to justify it to ourselves anyway.
Gordon-Smith is a thought-provoking host and a skilled interviewer. She approaches her guests’ “little bad things” as mistakes, not as immutable moral failings. The perspective of the show aims not to condemn people for the decisions they’ve made, but rather to explore why they made those choices, how they feel about them after the fact, and what they can do to try to put things to rights in the future. Gordon-Smith invites us to empathize with her guests and reflect on our own regretful decisions—not out of a sense of shame and self-abasement, but as an exploration of a universal but uncomfortable part of being human. We’ve all made decisions that we regret. This show asks us to consider what those decisions mean to us and how they shape who we become.
“Little Bad Thing” is touchingly human. It shines a light on some of the uglier things people are capable of, but it’s in no way bleak, and it makes a point to show the better side of humanity, as well. I cannot recommend this podcast highly enough. Even from the first few episodes, I’ve walked away with a great deal to reflect on.
