I’ve noticed something in myself that I’m not proud of. When I think about the people who live near me — strangers I pass on the street but never speak to — my default assumption leans uncharitable: lazy, or too different, or simply not my problem. I don’t consciously decide to think this. It just shows up, quiet and automatic, the way a reflex does.
That assumption falls apart the moment I actually look around the room I’m sitting in. The glass I’m drinking from, the water running through the pipe, the shirt on my back, the table, the chair, the electricity humming somewhere behind the wall — none of it exists because of me. All of it came from people, most of whom I will never meet, and from generations who died before I was born. I didn’t invent a single thing that keeps me alive today. I only inherited it.
That’s the strange part about problems between people — political, religious, personal. Unlike a drought or a hurricane, they don’t carry their own physical weight. They exist mostly because we agree, without really examining it, that they do. Which means, in principle, we could decide otherwise. The limits here aren’t physical. They’re limits of imagination, and of willingness.
So when I catch myself writing off some stranger as undeserving of concern, I try to remember that the reflex isn’t a fact about them. It’s a blind spot in me — a failure to notice that everything I depend on to survive was made by someone I never bothered to see as fully real. The clean water didn’t fall from the sky already piped to my sink. Someone built that. I just forgot to ask who.
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