What If Everyone Around You Is Scared and Nobody Told You?

Sarah from finance once shut down my software proposal during a budget meeting. Not just questioned it (which would have been fine, questions are what meetings are theoretically for), but actually shut it down, with the kind of edge in her voice people use when they're barely holding something together. I'd presented a case for automation software that would eliminate one of my team's most time-consuming tasks, freeing them up for work that actually requires human judgment. The software cost roughly what we'd pay one full-time employee, and the ROI seemed obvious to me. Sarah responded with this tight-lipped "I don't think you understand the budget constraints we're operating under" before launching into what can only be described as a controlled detonation of accumulated grievance.¹

My first reaction was defensive irritation. The kind where you sit there nodding while internally composing the perfect response you'll never actually deliver. I spent the rest of the meeting half-listening, half-rehearsing various versions of "actually, Sarah, the constraints are exactly why we need this efficiency," each one more devastating than the last in my imagination. Later, walking back to my desk, I was still turning it over, polishing my sense of being wronged.²

Then I ran into David, who mentioned in passing that Sarah's been dealing with her mom's declining health, driving two hours each way twice a week to handle medications and doctor appointments, all while finance just got notified of another round of budget cuts coming next quarter. David said this casually, the way you mention someone took a different route to work, not like he was sharing classified information. He had no idea I'd just been mentally prosecuting Sarah for war crimes.³

This is what I mean about fear. Not the heart-pounding, adrenaline-spike fear you feel when you almost step off a curb into traffic. More the chronic, low-grade kind that psychologists call terror management but which really just means the constant background hum of anxiety about everything being too much and not enough simultaneously.⁴ Ernest Becker, who won a Pulitzer for thinking deeply about why humans do what they do, argued this fear of our own finitude drives basically everything. We build careers and families and 401(k)s as though these things will somehow outlast the inevitable. And when those structures feel threatened (your mom is dying, your budget got slashed, some well-meaning person asks for money you don't have), the fear surfaces as anger, defensiveness, withdrawal.

The difficult part is remembering this applies to everyone, not just the people whose struggles you happen to know about. Your coworker who keeps missing deadlines might be barely sleeping because their kid has night terrors. The person who cut you off in traffic might have just gotten terrible news. The barista who got your order wrong for the third time this week might be juggling three jobs and running on four hours of sleep.⁵

I don't mean this as some kind of inspirational poster platitude or justification for bad behavior. It's more mechanical than that. Your brain can hold approximately seven pieces of information in working memory at once (give or take two, depending on the research and what you're counting as a "piece"). This is cognitive load theory in action. When you're dealing with your own full catastrophe (work deadlines, relationship tensions, financial stress, that weird pain in your shoulder you're pretending isn't there), there's not much room left for accurately modeling the full catastrophe happening in other people's heads.⁶

So we default to the simplest explanation: they're rude, incompetent, thoughtless. We make what psychologists call fundamental attribution error, explaining other people's behavior through their character flaws while explaining our own through circumstances. When I'm short with someone, it's because I'm stressed and overwhelmed. When someone is short with me, it's because they're a jerk. Neat. Tidy. Wrong.⁷

The system we've built makes this worse. Not in some abstract, blame-capitalism way (though there's probably something there), but in the immediate, practical sense that everyone around you is being pulled in multiple directions by competing demands, each one supposedly urgent, all of them happening at once.⁸ Your manager needs that report by end of day. Your partner needs you to remember to pick up groceries. Your kid's teacher needs you to volunteer for the fundraiser. Your parents need you to call more often. Your body needs you to exercise, sleep better, drink more water. Your soul (or whatever we're calling it) needs you to find meaning and purpose and authentic connection. And somehow you're also supposed to be keeping up with current events and learning new skills and maintaining friendships and planning for retirement while composing the perfect response to Sarah from finance.⁹

Nobody can do all of this. Literally nobody. The math doesn't work. And yet the cultural messaging suggests that successful people somehow manage it, which means when you can't (and you can't), you feel inadequate. This inadequacy manifests as fear. Fear you're failing your kids, your job, your relationships, yourself. Fear that everyone else has figured out something you're missing. Fear that you'll be found out as the barely-functional impostor you sometimes feel like.¹⁰

When people operate from this place (and most people are operating from this place, at least some of the time), their bandwidth for patience, generosity, and accurate perception of social cues drops precipitously. They're in triage mode, trying to keep the most important plates spinning, which means other plates are going to drop. Including, sometimes, the plate labeled "being decent to the person in the budget meeting who probably meant well."¹¹

I started thinking about this more after the Sarah incident, noticing how often my interpretations of other people's behavior changed completely once I knew what they were dealing with. My neighbor who never returned my wave turned out to be dealing with a recent divorce and barely sleeping. The checkout clerk who seemed surly was working a double shift because his coworker called in sick. The friend who flaked on plans three times in a row was managing a parent's Alzheimer's diagnosis.¹²

Each time, the behavior went from seeming like a character flaw to seeming like someone doing their level best under difficult circumstances. Same actions, different story. The difference was information I didn't have access to initially, information most people don't advertise because we've collectively decided that looking competent means not letting anyone see you struggle.¹³

There's research suggesting that when people are reminded of their mortality, they cling more tightly to their worldviews and react more defensively to threats. This isn't conscious. You don't think "I'm going to die someday, therefore I will be a jerk to my colleague." It's more that the background terror level rises, making you more reactive, less flexible, quicker to perceive criticism as attack.¹⁴

And modern life is basically designed to ping that terror response constantly. Every notification is a small reminder of something you're not doing, someone you're not keeping up with, some way you're falling short. The news is a parade of things to be afraid of. Social media shows you everyone else's carefully curated competence. Your bank balance reminds you how precarious everything is. Your body reminds you it won't last forever.¹⁵

So when Sarah shut down my proposal, she wasn't just responding to my request for software budget. She was responding from a place where she's trying to protect a budget that's already under threat, manage the anxiety of knowing more cuts are coming, process her mom's deteriorating condition, maintain her own performance at a level that won't make her vulnerable when those cuts hit, and probably also deal with whatever else I don't know about because we're work colleagues, not confidantes. My proposal hit her in that state, and she reacted from fear dressed up as fiscal responsibility.¹⁶

Recognizing this doesn't require you to be a saint. You don't have to find endless compassion for everyone who treats you poorly. Sometimes people are just having a bad day, and sometimes people are actually jerks (fear can explain behavior without excusing it). But there's something practically useful about defaulting to "they're probably doing their best under circumstances I don't fully understand" rather than "they're deliberately making my life harder."¹⁷

The first interpretation leaves room for connection. The second closes it off. The first allows you to respond in ways that might actually help. The second locks you into defensive crouch. And (this is the part that surprised me) the first interpretation is almost always more accurate than the second, even when you don't have the specific details of what someone is dealing with.¹⁸

Because here's what I've started to notice: people rarely wake up thinking "today I'm going to be difficult and make everyone around me miserable." They wake up already behind, already overwhelmed, already managing multiple competing demands and fears. They're doing triage. And sometimes that means you're the thing that gets triaged.

It helps to remember you're doing the same thing to other people, whether you realize it or not. All those times you were short with someone because you were stressed, all those emails you wrote in a tone that came across wrong, all those small moments where you were less patient, less generous, less present than you wish you'd been. Those weren't character flaws. Those were you, trying your best under whatever load you were carrying, sometimes succeeding and sometimes not.

I'm not suggesting lowering standards or accepting bad behavior. When you misdiagnose the problem (they're being difficult because they're difficult people), you can't solve it. When you see it more accurately (they're having trouble managing their load, which is making them reactive), you might actually be able to help, or at least avoid making it worse, or at bare minimum not carry around the weight of feeling personally attacked.

Sarah and I talked the next day. I asked if my proposal had come at a bad time, and she apologized for her tone. Turned out she'd gotten a call from her mom's nursing home right before the meeting. Nothing immediately dangerous, but the kind of call that puts you on edge and makes everything else feel precarious. We're working on a phased approach to the software, starting smaller. The world kept turning.

The interaction would have gone differently if I'd stayed in my defended position, nursing my sense of being wronged. Probably would have escalated into one of those pointless office feuds that make everyone miserable and accomplish nothing. Instead, knowing what I know now about how fear drives behavior, I could see past my own defensive reaction to what was actually happening. Someone struggling, doing their best, and having a moment where their best wasn't great.

Most people, most of the time, are in that state. The ones who cut you off in traffic, who are short with you at work, who seem sullen or withdrawn or overly defensive. They're running their own version of the same impossible calculation you're running: too many demands, not enough time, not enough energy, not enough certainty. And underneath it all, the same fear you feel. That it's all too fragile, too temporary, too much.

When you remember this (which is hard, especially when someone just snapped at you or cut you off or forgot your birthday), it doesn't make their behavior okay. It just makes it make sense. And that slight shift, from "they're terrible" to "they're struggling," changes how you respond, which changes how they respond, which maybe, over time, makes everything slightly less terrible for everyone.

Or maybe not. I don't want to oversell this. But it's better than the alternative, which is walking around perpetually annoyed at everyone for being human in ways that inconvenience you.

Footnotes

¹ This is the kind of meeting moment that lives in your head for days, getting rerun and reanalyzed, which I realize says more about my tendency toward rumination than about the actual severity of the interaction. ↩︎

² The revenge fantasy version of any interaction is always more satisfying than reality, where you usually just mumble something conciliatory and change the subject. This is probably for the best, socially speaking, even if it's frustrating. ↩︎

³ The metaphor here is deliberately overblown. Sarah did not actually commit war crimes. She was dismissive in a meeting. But this is how it feels in the moment, which is part of why these interactions are so sticky. ↩︎

⁴ "Terror management" sounds more dramatic than it is, though I suppose all management of terror is somewhat dramatic. The theory suggests we're all constantly managing the awareness of our own mortality by building cultural structures and personal achievements that feel permanent. Which sounds pretentious until you notice you do this too. ↩︎

⁵ There's a version of this observation that tips into "you should be infinitely patient with everyone because you never know what they're going through," which is both true and impossible. I'm not arguing for sainthood. Just for slightly more accurate assumptions about what's driving behavior. ↩︎

⁶ George Miller's famous paper about the magical number seven was actually more nuanced than how it's usually cited, but the basic point holds: your working memory is limited, and when it's full of your own stuff, there's not much room for accurately modeling other people's internal states. ↩︎

⁷ This error is so consistent across cultures and contexts that it's one of the most robust findings in social psychology, which should tell you something about how fundamental it is to human cognition. We're basically hardwired to make this mistake. ↩︎

⁸ I'm trying to avoid the "everything is capitalism's fault" frame here, though there's something worth examining about systems that demand increasing productivity with decreasing resources. But that's a different essay. ↩︎

⁹ And also remember to floss, meditate daily, stay hydrated, maintain your hobbies, nurture your inner child, set boundaries, practice gratitude, keep your resume updated, and somehow also just relax and be present. The list is endless and contradictory. ↩︎

¹⁰ Imposter syndrome is such a widespread experience that psychologists have a name for it, which should suggest it's not actually about you being an imposter but about the impossibility of meeting all the demands placed on you. But knowing this doesn't make it feel less real. ↩︎

¹¹ Triage mode means you're making rapid decisions about what matters most without time for careful consideration, which means you're going to make some mistakes, including social mistakes. This applies to everyone, not just you. ↩︎

¹² Once you start seeing this pattern, you can't unsee it. Every time you learn what someone is actually dealing with, their behavior makes more sense. Which suggests most behavior would make more sense if we knew what people were dealing with. ↩︎

¹³ The cultural pressure to appear competent and in control means we're all walking around pretending we have it together while privately feeling like we're barely managing. This creates a feedback loop where everyone thinks they're the only one struggling, which makes them try harder to hide it, which reinforces everyone else's belief that they're the only one struggling. It's exhausting. ↩︎

¹⁴ The terror management research is kind of darkly funny if you can get past the bleakness of the premise. Researchers literally remind people they're going to die and then measure how it affects their behavior. The answer is: in predictable and not especially flattering ways. ↩︎

¹⁵ I'm simplifying here. Obviously there's variation in how much terror people experience based on their circumstances, mental health, support systems, and so on. But the basic structure (modern life = many reminders of your inadequacy and mortality) seems pretty universal. ↩︎

¹⁶ This makes it sound like I had some kind of enlightened response in the moment. I didn't. I was annoyed for hours. It was only later, after talking to David and then thinking about it more, that I could see past my own defensive reaction. ↩︎

¹⁷ This isn't binary. Sometimes people are doing their best and their best includes being genuinely difficult in ways that aren't just about external circumstances. But starting from "they're probably trying" is usually more accurate than starting from "they're being difficult on purpose." ↩︎

¹⁸ I should note that this principle has limits. If someone is consistently treating you poorly, you're not required to keep making excuses for them. Sometimes people really are jerks, and sometimes protecting yourself means limiting contact with them, regardless of what they're dealing with. But that's different from writing off everyone who has a bad moment. ↩︎