I recently learned a word for this phenomenon:

sonder
n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own — populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness — an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Experiencing sonder is an extremely humbling and transient experience. The faces that pass you on the street as you head toward your destination are all blurs and insignificant to you. Same thing with our family and our friends. They are all side characters in our respective stories, and we are the protagonist. I sometimes make the mistake of treating them like side characters. I experience the same from others. We need to pay attention to these moments of sonder and get out of our own heads.

Love the ending. Made me really pause and think about how I’ve been treating the people in my life and the strangers I interact with. Great piece once again Thanos! Your writing is always insightful and filled with great advice on how to live a better life.

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But that means that even my personal villains are the good guys in their own stories. And then I am the villain in theirs.

Or even worst, I might be the bad guy involuntarily in someone else’s adventure.

Because at the end of the day, there are no good guys and bad guys.

There is just us vs them. And deliberate or unnecessary conflicts.

So maybe, I should try to get down from my high horse.

The whole world does not revolve around me and I do not always have to rationalize my actions as divine and heroic.