Being completely unaware of anyone else:
- Standing in doorways, using your phone or having a conversation
- Talking loudly when inappropriate, when I’m in pain at the doctors, I don’t want to hear about your roses
- leaving your shopping trolley blocking the aisle sideways in the supermarket while looking for your stuff
- driving down the middle of the road so everyone else has to pull over, when there’s plenty of room for two cars to pass
- stopping in the middle of the road without indicating, while: looking for your destination, or having a conversation, or deciding what day it is
- riding your delivery bike down the footpath at high speed weaving between pedestrians
As Jean-Paul Sartre said, “Hell is other people”.
I can’t find a source right now, because I just woke up and I don’t want to, so (Trust Me Bro, et al, 2024) but there’s a chance that quote is actually about Nazis!
A lot of French people referred to them as “the others” and would often speak sort of semi-codedly about them in writing and such so as not to piss off their new overlords. So that line may well not have been “I’m such an introvert that being around other humans is like being in hell” but instead “hell has delivered itself to my doorstep in the form of goose-stepping bastards”
That’s not at all what the quote is and neither is the top level commenter’s interpretation, and I think it not being these is pretty obvious if you read No Exit. The point that he was making (and this is putting it crassly because I know jack shit about his Heidegger-based phenomenology) is the presence of other people forces us to be self-conscious, to regard ourselves as the object of someone else’s perception and judgement. That’s why Sartre goes out of his way to say the room (their jail cell in Hell, effectively) had no reflective surfaces, so that the character’s perception of themselves could only come from the people they are stuck with (this doesn’t entirely make sense, but I am pretty sure it’s what he meant). You can read him talk about some of the premises informing this by checking out his writing on “The Look,” like is quoted below this comic.
So it’s a slightly obtuse point about intersubjectivity that people have turned into a cutesy way of talking about their own misanthropy. It’s probably more emblematic of the meaning of the quote how people in this thread, original commenter especially, are talking about silently judging people for this and that action.
stopping in the middle of the road without indicating, while: looking for your destination, or having a conversation, or deciding what day it is
That’s my new pet peeve. The thing is I don’t remember seeing people do this in the past and certainly not frequently, but now I see it all the time. Mind-boggling selfishness. I think Covid rotted everyone’s brains way more than we realize.
Someone stopped in front of me… on an offramp. Luckily there was nobody behind me to hit me, but that’s an insane place to stop. No hazard lights, no indication. Just stopped.
I once got caught behind someone who came to an abrupt stop in a roundabout so they could go to the next episode / video on their iPad that they had attached to their dashboard.
- riding your delivery bike down the footpath at high speed weaving between pedestrians
Gotta include the ones riding at night in black/dark clothes with no reflectors or lights; be it using the crosswalk, against a ‘do not cross’ or in the middle of the [car] lane, ignoring the bike lane.
