Strange How We Unbelievably Started Treating Others As Obstacles.

Something feels deeply strange about the way we move through the world now.

Strangers are no longer people sharing the same sidewalk, elevator, or brief moment. They have become obstacles. The person walking a little too slowly in front of us is an inconvenience to be passed. The driver who hesitates at a green light is an obstruction to our progress. The colleague who asks a clarifying question in a meeting is a delay. Somewhere along the way, we stopped seeing other human beings as fellow travelers and started treating them as barriers between us and whatever we are rushing toward.

This shift did not happen overnight, and it did not announce itself with banners. It arrived quietly, disguised as efficiency, self-care, and the reasonable demand for personal space. Yet the cumulative effect is unmistakable: a widespread erosion of manners and respect that feels less like cultural evolution and more like a collective failure of imagination.

Manners were never merely about which fork to use or whether to say “please.”

At their core, they were small, repeated acts of recognition. Holding a door, making eye contact, lowering one’s voice in shared spaces, waiting one’s turn—these gestures said, in effect, “I see that you are here, and your presence matters enough for me to adjust my behavior.” Respect was the larger frame: the assumption that other people possess interior lives as complex and legitimate as our own. Together, manners and respect formed a kind of social lubricant that made dense human living possible without constant friction.

That lubricant has thinned. In traffic, aggressive lane changes are no longer the exception; they’re often the default. In grocery stores, the person who leaves a cart blocking an aisle rarely glances back. Online, the absence of a face has made cruelty almost frictionless. We interrupt more readily, speak over one another more freely, and justify it with the language of authenticity or urgency. The underlying message is consistent: your existence is secondary to my momentum.

Several forces have accelerated this change. Speed is one.

Modern life rewards velocity—faster replies, shorter waits, quicker results. When every second feels billable or scrollable, the pause required for courtesy begins to look like waste. Technology intensifies the problem. Headphones, screens, and algorithmically curated feeds create portable private worlds. Inside those worlds, other people register primarily as noise or interruption. The more time we spend in curated isolation, the less practice we get at the small negotiations of shared physical space.

Individualism, once a hard-won protection of personal dignity, has in many places hardened into competitive self-absorption. The cultural script that once emphasized mutual obligation now often celebrates the relentless pursuit of one’s own goals, with little language left for the idea that those goals exist among other people’s goals. Busyness has become both a status marker and an excuse. “I’m just so busy” functions as a socially acceptable reason to skip the greeting, the thank-you, or the moment of genuine attention.

The loss is not only aesthetic.

Treating people as obstacles changes how we feel toward them and how they feel toward us. Chronic low-level antagonism raises the temperature of ordinary encounters. Frustration becomes the ambient emotion of public life. People who are routinely treated as barriers begin to respond in kind, creating feedback loops of impatience and indifference. The result is a society that is simultaneously more connected by technology and more emotionally fragmented in daily experience.

There is also a quieter cost. Manners and respect are not merely constraints; they are practices that keep us human-sized in one another’s eyes. When we abandon them, we shrink the moral imagination. It becomes easier to see the slow walker as an impediment rather than a person who might be tired, injured, or simply moving at a different pace. It becomes easier to flatten complex lives into temporary obstacles. Over time, that flattening seeps inward. We become less practiced at recognizing the full reality of others, and eventually of ourselves.

None of this requires nostalgia for an imaginary golden age of politeness. Earlier eras had their own forms of exclusion and hierarchical disrespect. The point is not that the past was better, but that something specific and valuable has been allowed to atrophy: the everyday assumption that other people are not in our way—they are simply in the world with us.

Reversing the trend does not demand grand gestures.

It requires deliberately reintroducing small recognitions. Making space for someone to pass. Looking up from a phone when addressed. Choosing not to treat another person’s pace as a personal affront. These acts are almost absurdly ordinary, which is precisely why they matter. They reassert, amid constant acceleration, that the people around us are not scenery or interference. They are the substance of the shared world we claim to inhabit.

The strangeness of treating others as obstacles is that it is so thoroughly unnecessary. We do not need to move more slowly or achieve less in order to treat one another with basic regard. We need only to remember that the person in front of us is not an object between us and our destination. That person is, like us, trying to get somewhere while carrying an entire life that we cannot see. Manners and respect are the brief acknowledgments of that fact. Losing them has not made us freer or more efficient. It has only made the common spaces of life colder and more exhausting than they need to be.

The remedy is not complicated. It is simply the decision, repeated many times a day, to see people again.

As Always, Stay Vigilant and Be Prepared

You play a critical role in your preparedness. By preparing yourself for the unexpected, you will become more self-reliant and a valuable asset to your community