It’s You, Not Me

Public behaviour is in freefall, and no, we cannot keep blaming Covid. It has been long enough. Plenty of time to recalibrate, take a breath, and remember how to exist alongside other people without treating every shared space like a personal obstacle course.

What we are dealing with now is ego, plain and simple. A belief that urgency equals importance, that being seen equals being significant, that if someone else moves first, boards first, speaks first, then something has been stolen from you. It hasn’t. But that does not stop people behaving like it has.

Take public transport. Doors open and instead of the very basic, very efficient act of letting people off, bodies surge forward. People press themselves against bus and train doors like they are trying to court them, terrified that if they do not get on first they will miss it and never emotionally recover. The irony is obvious. This behaviour slows everything down. It creates chaos where there should be flow and wastes everyone’s time, including their own.

Then there is the noise. Speakerphone calls blasted into entire carriages. Video calls held inches from faces, phones gripped like blocks of cheese, as if the internal speaker painstakingly designed to work perfectly well against an ear simply does not exist. Conversations about absolutely nothing projected to everyone, because silence is apparently unbearable and privacy now optional. Add music playing out loud and suddenly the city has become an unpaid audience.

The people giving you dirty looks are not killjoys. They are unwilling participants. They did not know the circus was in town and they certainly did not buy tickets.

And then there is obstruction. People standing dead still in doorways, apparently struck by a sudden and overwhelming urge to check their phone. Groups spreading across pavements with no intention of moving in. Entire footpaths swallowed by groups marching seven abreast like they have been hired for a parade in a theme park, confidently advancing as if the world will part for them. No adjustment. No awareness. No acknowledgement. You either step into the road, stop entirely, or collide. Their togetherness, it seems, is more important than your ability to get anywhere.

Theatres and cinemas are not spared. Phones glow mid performance. Feet appear on the backs of seats. Entire buffets are consumed as though the point of attending was anything other than watching. Why spend the money to be somewhere if you are determined to behave as though you are in your living room.

None of this is irrational. None of it is generational. Wanting to get from A to B without running a gauntlet of entitlement is not unreasonable. Wanting to enjoy something without someone else intruding on the experience is not snobbish. What is unreasonable is the expectation that everyone else should absorb your noise, your chaos, your urgency, simply because you refuse to think beyond yourself.

This behaviour is rude. It is crude. And it is exhausting. It points to a society that has confused freedom with selfishness and confidence with dominance, and somewhere along the way forgotten that public life only works if we occasionally rein ourselves in.

The solution is not dramatic. It is not authoritarian. It is simple. Lower your volume. Take up less room. Wait your turn. Stop performing. If you stop making everything about you, you will quickly notice something remarkable. People will look at you a lot less, and everyone, including you, will get where they are going far more easily.

The excuses are exhausted. Public space demands restraint, awareness, and respect for others and behaviour that rejects those basics will no longer be indulged.