A Note About People Who Skip The Line

Last week I was driving to play in a soccer game, the semi-finals for a league I play in, and I was running a little late. As I neared the exit on the freeway I saw the line was backed up probably half a mile, inching forward. So I quickly switched lanes and got into the back of the line and waited my turn.

Society has conditioned us to do exactly that. We’ve been taught that it’s selfish to skip the line, that it’s wrong to be the person that deems it more important that they get wherever they want to go than others. And because of that many of us follow the rules and play our part.

But does that mean those who don’t are bad people? That those who skip the line should be shamed for their defiance and taught a lesson? Sometimes we think about not letting them merge into our lane to teach them a lesson, don’t we?

Well, in this case, there were many such people slowing down traffic, merging into the exit lane ahead of me closer to the exit without waiting their turn.

In moments like these there’s the classic case of giving them ‘benefit of the doubt’. Maybe there’s an emergency. But I figured for that many people, it simply wasn’t the case.

So instead I got curious. What about their outlook on the world made this a perfectly reasonable choice? If I were to ask one of these people about it, and they answered honestly, what would they say?

I realized that everything I shared about this being the morally wrong thing to do is my conditioning and not necessarily there’s. They might argue that this is simply how the world works, and most people are sheep blindly following social norms.

I don’t have a good way of ending this story other than saying, our reality is relative. We experience it in our own way that represents our truth. But that doesn’t mean it’s right or wrong, it’s just ours.

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