It Wasn't About You

The message that goes unanswered, the car that cuts you off, a colleague's curt email. The instinctive reading is always the same: they did it to me. An old mental rule answers that trap — Hanlon's razor: never attribute to bad faith what can be explained by carelessness.

It isn't naivety; it's statistics. People forget, run late, type with a child crying next to them, reply without rereading. Slips are vastly more common than conspiracies, so the innocent explanation is right almost every time. And it has a practical advantage: if you respond to a slip as if it were an attack, the attack ends up existing — except you manufactured it.

The razor has its limit, of course: what repeats is no longer a slip, it's a pattern, and patterns deserve attention. But as a first hypothesis it works: almost nobody is thinking about you. Which is humiliating and liberating, in exactly that order.