You Are Not the Target. You’re Just the Background Noise
by Don Hall
There’s a moment—usually around hour six of being stuck in line at the DMV or minute three of listening to someone explain cryptocurrency at a party—where your soul lifts out of your body, peers down at the chaos, and thinks: these people can’t possibly be evil, they’re too fucking dumb. And not dumb in the genetic, standardized-test sense, but dumb like a consciousness jammed in third gear. Not malicious, not Machiavellian. Just terminally self-involved.
The thesis here is both obvious and somehow radical in a culture currently obsessed with calling out micro-aggressions like we’re all in a very special episode of CSI: Identity Politics Division. And the thesis is this: most people are not out to get you—they don’t even see you.
They are thinking about their receding hairlines. They are wondering if that mole on their thigh is getting bigger. They are mentally crafting the perfect comment on some stranger’s Instagram post that makes them look deep and funny and a little damaged in that Tinder-bait kind of way. They’re navigating a river of perpetual existential dread in a raft made of old cereal boxes and delusion. Which is to say, they are deeply human.
We’re all walking around like the stars of our own after-school specials, mistaking other people’s indifference for aggression because indifference hurts worse. It’s not that the guy cut you off in traffic because he hates your Prius. It’s because you didn’t exist to him beyond that moment, and probably won’t again. And that? That’s the gut punch.
Picture the average American as a sweaty, over-caffeinated swimmer treading water in a sensory deprivation tank filled with lukewarm Diet Coke. He can’t see you, can’t hear you, and the only thing he’s feeling is the growing anxiety that someone might be watching and judging his form. Every movement he makes is a flail, every intention fogged up by a narcissistic need to just keep himself afloat. This is not evil. This is ego’s last stand.
The modern condition is a default setting—where we interpret the world entirely through the lens of self. You don’t think about the fact that the guy yelling on his cell phone in the cereal aisle might have just lost his job or found out his kid is failing school. You think: What a jackass. Why is this happening to me? As if the universe specifically scheduled that moment to disrupt your sacred journey to the Honey Nut Cheerios.
And we’re all doing it. Constantly. It’s a miracle anyone manages to be kind at allunder the weight of that kind of solipsistic dragnet.
Which brings us to the fallacy of intentional cruelty. The modern discourse, particularly among Very Online circles, is premised on the assumption that people who disagree with you—or fail to accommodate every invisible nuance of your lived experience—are intentionally being dicks. That their sin is premeditated. As if Karen at the Walgreens makeup counter didn’t just screw up your shade match, but committed a hate crime against your undertones.
No. Karen’s just exhausted, underpaid, and mentally calculating whether she has enough left on her debit card to buy gas and a pack of menthols. You are not the target. You are background noise.
It’s a bitter pill to swallow because being a victim is addictive. It gives structure to chaos. It means there’s a reason things hurt—and better yet, a person to blame. But most of the time? There isn’t. There’s no grand orchestrator of your suffering. Just a guy trying to parallel park while texting his mistress and eating a Chalupa.
To be actively malicious, you have to give a shit. You have to take time out of your day to plan harm, to deliver cruelty with purpose. You have to be the type of person who writes Yelp reviews that include phrases like “utterly unforgivable” or “the server sneered when I asked for gluten-free options.” That’s a hobbyist evil, the province of bored suburbanites and cable news producers. But your average human? Too swamped with their own personal brand of dread to keep up that kind of extracurricular darkness.
Let’s call this what it is: The Banality of the Self-Centered.
It’s like the Banality of Evil, only instead of Nazis organizing train schedules, it’s dudes in cargo shorts ignoring their screaming toddlers while doom-scrolling Twitter threads about “masculinity in crisis.” They’re not scheming. They’re surviving. Poorly.
And yet, this self-centeredness does hurt people. It causes accidents. It ruins friendships. It leads to broken systems where nobody listens and everyone assumes malice because empathy requires effort. But attributing cruelty to what is, in fact, negligent narcissism, is like blaming a hurricane for not being considerate enough to avoid the poor neighborhoods.
Sure, there are the exceptions. Genuine sociopaths. People who do harm for sport. But they’re rare—and usually too busy running Fortune 500 companies or evangelizing on YouTube. For every Gordon Gekko or Jordan Peterson, there are a thousand people just trying not to cry during their lunch break.
If we could actually hear each other’s internal monologues, the world would stop functioning. Not out of horror, but out of noise. Everyone thinking, worrying, obsessing about their own shit, twenty-four hours a day. The silence we all crave isn’t peace—it’s just the absence of other people’s noise, because we’ve got so much of our own.
See, the real tragedy isn’t that people are too self-centered to be malicious. It’s that they’re too self-centered to be present. Which means they don’t connect. They don’t reach out. They don’t see. They bumble through lives of quiet disconnection, a thousand tiny unkindnesses born not from hate, but from a kind of spiritual myopia.
The coworker who doesn’t say thank you. The friend who ghosts you without explanation. The driver who tailgates you while picking their nose with abandon. They’re not trying to ruin your day. They don’t even know they’re in your day.
If we stopped assuming malice and started assuming distraction—if we understood that the guy who just said something clueless isn’t a villain, but a dipshit with a half-charged mental battery—maybe we could respond with something better than rage. Maybe patience. Maybe curiosity. Maybe a very mild, well-aimed insult. But not scorched-earth indignation.
Because the world doesn’t need more judgment. It needs more awareness. And ironically, the first step to awareness is realizing that you are not the center of the universe either.
Which sucks, frankly. But it also liberates you. If you’re not the main character, then other people’s behavior is not necessarily about you. The barista didn’t smile? He might have just gotten dumped. Your spouse snapped at you over the dishes? She might be spiraling over her parents’ mortality. Your boss forgot your name? Well, okay, your boss might be an asshole. But again—probably not on purpose.
If we stopped trying to diagnose evil in every uncomfortable moment and instead embraced the awkward, self-obsessed chaos of modern life, we might just find the empathy we keep claiming to value. But empathy isn’t cheap. It requires imagination. It requires slowing down. And for a species that checks phones while peeing and skips through 30-second ads, imagination is in tragically short supply.
So what now?
We lower the bar. We stop expecting sainthood and start celebrating the tiny miracles of decency: the guy who lets you merge. The friend who remembers your dog’s name. The stranger who gives you the nod in the hallway. These are not acts of God. They are acts of grace in spite of the self-centered slog. And they matter.
Because the only real antidote to cruelty isn’t canceling people or calling them out. It’s showing up with awareness when no one else is. It’s understanding that the selfishness of others isn’t always a threat. Sometimes, it’s just a mirror.
And that’s the kicker, right? The thing we hate most in others is usually the thing we haven’t faced in ourselves. Their obliviousness is our projection. Their self-absorption, our own. So maybe the solution isn’t to fix everyone else. Maybe it’s to stop being the asshole in someone else’s story.
The revolution won’t be televised. It won’t be a protest or a trending hashtag. It’ll be a silent decision, made in a grocery store checkout line, to not assume the worst. It’ll be the choice to believe the cashier is doing her best, even if she doesn’t say hello. It’ll be the shrug of forgiveness offered when the world forgets you for a second—because God knows, you’ve forgotten it plenty of times yourself.
So yeah. Most people aren’t monsters. They’re just hungry, late, horny, scared, tired, annoyed, slightly gassy, and probably dehydrated.
And if that’s not reason enough to stop taking shit personally, then nothing is.
