Not maliciously. Not even negligently, really. Just the ordinary spatial obliviousness of a person moving through the world from the inside of their own head, where they are the center of the frame and everything else is peripheral. You stopped in a doorway to check something on your phone. You’re walking three abreast on a sidewalk built for two. You paused at the top of an escalator to get your bearings while the escalator kept producing people behind you who now have nowhere to go. You didn’t mean to. You just forgot, briefly, that the space belongs to everyone.
We all do this. It’s not a character flaw. It’s a structural feature of being a person — you have complete access to your own intentions and zero access to everyone else’s, so the default is to operate as though the world is mostly empty except for the things directly relevant to you at this moment. The person trying to get past you in the grocery aisle doesn’t exist until they’re close enough to be unavoidable. Before that they’re just background.
What’s interesting is the asymmetry of annoyance around this. When someone is in your way, it’s obvious and immediate — you feel the friction of the blocked path, the small imposition of having to slow or stop or navigate around someone who isn’t paying attention. When you’re in someone else’s way, you usually have no idea, because from inside your head you’re just standing there thinking about something. The experience of blocking and being blocked are completely invisible to each other. Everyone is the pedestrian, nobody is the obstacle, and yet somehow the obstacles keep appearing.
There are people who are very good at spatial awareness — who move through crowded spaces with a fluid consideration for the people around them, who seem to have a wider peripheral field for other humans, who step aside before you knew you needed them to. They’re a genuine pleasure to navigate around. And then there are the people who move through the world like it’s an empty stage built specifically for their scene, who stop without looking, who turn without signaling, who take up exactly as much space as they feel like taking up and seem genuinely surprised when this creates friction.
I was someone’s obstacle today. I’m certain of it. I don’t know when or where. Someone needed to get past me and I wasn’t paying attention and they either waited or went around and I never registered any of it. They might have thought something mildly uncharitable about me in that moment. That’s fair. I was probably somewhere else in my head, mid-thought, temporarily a piece of furniture in someone else’s day. We all are, constantly, to everyone around us. The least we can do is move a little faster when we notice.