I Didn't Think You

Hi, friends. I just want to say: I have an electric moped, and her name is Judy. I’ve been riding Judy for three years and have put 7K miles on her. I used to have a cargo bike, but it got stolen (right out of my garage!) so I decided to get something harder to steal, even though I miss actually pedaling. Judy is an incredibly passive way to move through life.

Mostly I ride Judy to get my daughter to school. It’s a 15-20 minute ride whose chief objective is to get us there in one piece, as quickly as possible.

Despite safety being a top priority, I find that riding Judy puts me in a solipsistic state of mind. I have to try very hard to notice other people and other cars. I constantly have to force myself to look left and right and even then, it’s not clear that I am actually seeing anything as I do.

Once I’ve dropped my daughter off, this problem gets worse. The ride home is essentially a full-on solipsist race back to my desk so I can start writing about other people. Irony.

Today on the way back home, there was a guy on a stand-up scooter ahead of me. As we both neared the intersection, he slowed down and then swerved right in front of me for no apparent reason. I yelled out something ridiculous like "WHOA.” He turned to me and said, “My bad, I didn’t think you.” I feel like he meant to say: “I didn’t see you.” But actually, “I didn’t think you” seems more on point.

Now, I am not trying to distill from my ridiculous experiences on my moped a referendum on the culture, but also: I am. Does any of us think each other anymore? Put differently, if thinking each other were the norm, Charlie Kirk’s murder would have come as more of a shock. But I don’t think anyone is shocked. Horrified, unsettled, deeply upset: yes. But shocked? No.

There’s been a lot of great pieces lately about political violence (this one even before Kirk’s murder) and a lot of talk about authoritarianism being the natural outcome of a culture that does not tolerate speech (or vise versa) but I haven’t seen a whole lot about solipsism as a driving force of our politics these days—not to mention our hatred. I’m not talking about a lack of empathy or sympathy but the very real problem of not considering that other people exist at all.

Kirk’s assassin joked about his “doppelganger” having committed the murder; in short, we’re living in a world where avatars and doubles feel more real than each other. Are more real, because in many ways, we don’t exist for each other. At least not all the time. Or just not enough of the time.

I understand that none of this is profound. And I, in fact, am deeply depressed about Kirk’s death. So do not mistake my observations on this beautiful, sunny day for glibness.

Still, I’ve been staring at this computer screen for hours and only just now noticed my neighbor clipping ivy with his shirt off, wearing oversized headphones and listening, maybe, to 70s disco, given those dance moves. They’re pretty remarkable.