Side Characters

On the quiet brutality of being treated as a function in someone else’s life

One of the most quietly brutal things people do is treat other human beings as side characters in the movie of their own life. They do not always do it with obvious cruelty. Usually they do it casually, almost politely, which is why it takes so long to name. They text when they are bored. They summon the entertaining version of you. They want the wine person, the funny person, the smart person, the person who knows restaurants, the person who can explain what is happening in the world, the person who can be counted on to restore tone, mood, or momentum to a day they would otherwise have to spend alone with themselves. They want access to the function you perform in their life while refusing to register the life you are actually living.

That, to me, is one of the most common forms of dehumanization. It rarely arrives with shouting, humiliation, or spectacular abuse. It arrives through the everyday flattening of a person into use value and calling the result friendship. It happens when someone does not ask, with any seriousness, what world you are standing in before they ask you to resume your role in theirs. They assume time has smoothed over whatever they were too uncomfortable, too incurious, or too self-enclosed to understand in the first place. They want the old version of you back on stage. They want the service to resume. And when you do not deliver it, when you finally say I am not available for this performance, they experience that not as your humanity but as your aggression.

This is what happened with David. He knows, because I have told him repeatedly, that my life has been under sustained financial, emotional, and political pressure since Trump returned and the tariff situation started doing real damage to my business. He knows this is an ongoing structural crisis, the kind of pressure that changes the oxygen in a room and settles over everything. And yet every few months he texts me as if the crisis must have passed offscreen. He wants to talk German Pinot. He wants wine advice. He wants the version of me that existed for his pleasure before reality became inconvenient. He wants to wake up on a Sunday morning, drink his coffee, avoid whatever loneliness or boredom sits inside his own intact life, and summon Lyle the wine guy back into existence.

That is what made it so offensive. The erasure inside it. The assumption that because enough time had passed for him, enough time had passed for me. The assumption that a person can be left in the fire and then casually re-entered as though nothing is burning. The text was retrieval masquerading as conversation. He was asking for access to the version of me that made his day feel textured.

The contrast with Michael is the whole moral argument. On paper, both men occupy a similar category. Well-off, around my age, people I have had dinner with, people who like talking to me, people who enjoy some mix of my knowledge, humor, and way of seeing things. But when I tell Michael what is happening, he changes register. He says he is sorry. He understands that what I am dealing with is not a passing inconvenience but a real crisis, and he asks the practical human question beneath the whole story: how bad is it, how much damage are the tariffs actually doing, and what does day-to-day life look like inside that kind of pressure. He receives my pain as real. He does not try to turn it into a service category, a legal issue, a topic shift, an inconvenience, or a chance to get the old version of me back on the phone. He treats me as a person.

David treats me as access.

That distinction may sound small until you have lived inside it long enough to feel the blood draining from your limbs. Because it is not small. It is the difference between being seen and being used. And what makes it even uglier is that the using is often so socially acceptable. It comes dressed as friendliness. It arrives with good manners. It can even arrive with affection. That is what makes it so hard to confront. People like this do not think of themselves as exploitative. They think they are making conversation. They think they are reaching out. They think they are being normal. But normal for them often means this: please step back into the role I prefer you in and spare me the discomfort of your actual life.

There is a class dimension to this that people are often too embarrassed to name directly because class war, in the American imagination, is only supposed to count when it looks cinematic, like a factory floor, a picket line, a CEO bonus, a hedge fund vampire, some obvious tableau of extraction everyone already knows how to recognize. But class also operates through emotional insulation. Through the inability of one kind of person to metabolize the lived reality of another because money has kept their own life buffered against consequence. Sometimes class war is a rich man in a $5 million apartment being unable to absorb the fact that someone he likes is drowning. Sometimes it is a person with the resources to lose money and remain intact talking casually to someone for whom money loss changes the composition of the air. He thinks he is making conversation. You experience it as being asked to dance while the floor burns.

That is why these interactions feel so grotesque to me now. They are casual on the surface and ruthless underneath. They remind me of something I have known for a very long time, which is that many people do not really relate to other human beings. They relate to roles. They relate to usefulness. They relate to the part of you that makes sense inside their own life script. The second that script is interrupted by your actual suffering, by your actual limits, by your refusal to keep being whatever function you served for them, they become confused or offended. The side character has stepped out of frame. The furniture has started speaking. The wine guy has turned out to have a life.

And maybe I am especially sensitive to this because I have spent my whole life resisting the urge to do it to other people. I go to Starbucks every day. I know everyone in there. I know their names, their moods, pieces of their lives. We talk. It comes naturally to me because I cannot move through the world treating the people in front of me as machinery. It has always been like that. In the buildings where I grew up, with the doormen, the staff, the people my family treated as infrastructure, I was the one actually talking to them. The people my family treated as service categories were often the very people with whom I had the deepest conversations, the deepest relationships, the ones who saw me and whom I saw in return. That is not a sentimental point. It is the whole point. I have always understood, at a gut level, that other people are not scenery.

That is why David lands where he lands. He is violating a principle. He is doing the thing I have spent my life trying not to do, which is to flatten a person into a role that serves your own comfort. I know what it means to acknowledge someone in full, even when the encounter is brief, even when they are technically there to provide something, even when the world has already arranged the hierarchy and made the script available. I know what it means to look past the function and recognize the life. So when someone turns around and treats me as function, I feel the insult immediately. Because I know exactly what is missing.

This is also why I am increasingly allergic to the way people talk about friendship as though simple duration proves moral depth. It does not. Time does not equal recognition. Years do not equal seeing. You can know someone for decades and still only know the service they provide in your emotional economy. You can be fond of someone and still never really take in what is happening to them. You can invite them to dinner, text them, enjoy their company, think well of them in some broad, flattering way, and still fundamentally refuse to register the density of their life. A lot of relationships survive because the role remains stable. The second the person inside the role changes, or finally insists on being visible, the relationship reveals what it was built on.

And that is the violence of casual dehumanization. It usually arrives in ordinary, socially acceptable forms, which is exactly why it is so corrosive. People want the funny friend, the wise friend, the stylish friend, the useful friend, the one who always knows what to say, always knows what to order, always knows what bottle to bring, always knows how to make the room interesting. But if that person ever says, I am suffering, I am not available for performance, I need you to meet me where I actually am, suddenly the main character feels inconvenienced, even injured. He thinks the side character has gone off script. What he cannot understand is that the side character never was a side character. He was a full human being the whole time. The problem is that you only loved the edited version.

I am tired of that. Tired in the deep sense, not the theatrical one. Tired of people who want access without recognition. Tired of being treated as category instead of person. Tired of the wealthy and insulated acting as though their inability to feel the pressure in someone else’s life is a neutral fact rather than a moral failure. Tired of the way certain people can look directly at your crisis and still, somehow, ask for the entertaining version of you. Tired of the casual brutality of being reduced to what you provide.

There is no grand solution here. I do not think writing this will cure the problem. The people who treat others like scenery rarely think of themselves that way. They think they are social. They think they are kind. They think they are reaching out. But I know what I know now, and I am no longer willing to pretend that this flattening is harmless. It is not harmless to be treated as function. It is not harmless to be summoned as a role by someone who has ignored the reality of your life. It is not harmless to be asked to resume normalcy for another person’s comfort when your own life is still on fire.

One of the most quietly moral things a person can do is refuse that hierarchy altogether. Refuse to turn the barista into a coffee machine. Refuse to turn the doorman into a decorative presence in the lobby. Refuse to turn the friend into a category that exists for your entertainment or convenience. Refuse the whole rotten little system in which some people get to feel like protagonists and everyone else exists as support staff in the screenplay of their feelings. That refusal is discipline. It is a way of walking through the world without making everyone else disappear.

And when someone finally says to you, in one form or another, I am not scenery, I am not your wine guy, I am not your function, I have a life too, the moral test is very simple. Do you step toward that reality, or do you get offended that the furniture has started talking.