Most People Aren't Out to Get You

It’s almost never about you.

There’s an old adage worth keeping close: never attribute to malice what can be explained by distraction. It’s usually called Hanlon’s Razor, though the original phrasing uses “stupidity” instead, which I think misses the point. Most of what we perceive as someone being out to get us isn’t stupidity. It’s a person who didn’t sleep, hasn’t eaten, is late for something that matters, or is carrying something they can’t put down.

The driver who cut you off is rushing to pick up a sick kid. The colleague who snapped at you was up all night with a family crisis. The cashier who was short with you got bad news two minutes before you walked in. None of this excuses rude behavior, but it clears something up about most of it: it isn’t about you. It was never about you.

The instinct to take it personally is the ego inserting itself into a story it doesn’t belong in. We make ourselves the protagonist of the other person’s day. But the other person has their own day, with its own protagonists, and we are at most a passing extra.

Think about driving for a moment. Cars hurtle past each other at high speeds, separated only by strips of paint. It’s an absurd system that works because of a shared instinct for self-preservation. Nobody wants to crash. That same instinct explains a lot of what looks like rudeness in everyday life. People are paying attention to their own survival, their own priorities, their own list of things that haven’t gone well today. They aren’t paying attention to you. They almost never were.

This shift in perspective changes the math. When someone wrongs you, real or perceived, there’s an extra second available between what happened and how you respond. You can spend that second assuming malice. You can spend it asking what else might be going on in their world that you can’t see. The first option costs you the rest of your hour. The second often costs you nothing.

Excusing bad behavior isn’t the point. The point is not paying twice: once for what they did, and once again for the energy you spend deciding it was personal.

We extend ourselves grace on our worst days. We hope others will see past the surface of what we said and assume we were doing the best we could. The simplest move is to extend the same courtesy outward. The world isn’t full of bad people. It’s full of people trying to get through the day, sometimes badly.

The next time someone cuts you off in traffic or snaps at you for no apparent reason, you have a small choice. You can decide they’re the villain of your story. Or you can let them be a person you don’t know, having a day you can’t see, who was never thinking about you in the first place.

The second one is almost always closer to the truth.