Les autres

Today I was at the baker’s at exactly 11:39 am. It might seem a pretty random or average time, but when you know the area I live in, it’s not. You see, it’s a pretty bad idea to go to the baker’s or the grocery store here between the hours of 12 and 1 pm, and between 4 and 5 pm. The reason is that I live pretty close to several schools and at those times these shops are swamped with children getting sandwiches, potato chips, sodas, etcetera.

So imagine my surprise when I found that today at 11:39 the baker’s was already swamped with cackling teenage girls and boasty schoolboys. Crap. I knew they would all be ordering those very time-consuming baguettes with chicken-curry spread and stuff like that, but on the other hand I needed to eat too, didn't I? So there was nothing for it. I had to wait. About 15 minutes to be exact.

Which, of course, is not a disaster. After all, this is supposed to be my day off. Still, I was pretty annoyed. I kept wondering where those kids came from. I mean, when we were young, school wasn’t out until about 12 (11.50, I think), so what were they doing here? However, with some of them, I couldn’t tell whether they might be university students or not. I mean, nowadays (oh yes, grandpa Fred is back!) I can’t honestly tell whether some of these girls are 15 or 20.

So anyway, while I was waiting at the baker’s, I began to think about being annoyed by other people, as it had happened to me a few times the previous days. Last Friday evening, for instance, while I was in my car (carpooling with a friend, mind you) on the ring road where traffic was just awful, I had the same feeling. Or two days later, when I made the very bad decision of checking out the Fnac store on a ‘shopping Sunday’, which was just swarming with people.

At times like that I find myself quite honestly wondering: “What are all these people doing here?” Really, sometimes I want to go up to them and ask them: “What are you doing here? What possible, good reason can you have for being here? Are you sure you’re not here just to annoy me?” As Sartre said: L’enfer c’est les autres.

Of course I’m being a self-centred ass here, but I’m fairly certain most of us feel like this once in a while. Other people can be so annoying. And the strange, even scary, part is that we’re not annoyed because of what these people do (although that doesn’t always help either!). We are annoyed because of the basic fact that they’re there.

Which is not that surprising. Indeed, to a certain extent it's impossible for anyone to come loose from the way we experience reality, which is always opposed to the way everybody else experiences reality. I mean: I’m me, and I may wonder what it’s like to be someone else, but I’ll never know for sure. (When I was a child I sometimes played with the thought that the whole world was an elaborate conspiracy and that only I was real and other people robots or aliens acting the part of people. I was a strange child, mind you).

But the thing is: this is a dangerous emotion, and what’s more (so I thought waiting for yet another kid specifying his order: ‘egg, but no cucumber and carrots instead of lettuce on my spicy-tuna-brown bread baguette please’): it’s illogical. Indeed, if I am an ego, then so is everybody else. And if I divide the world into ‘me’ and ‘other people’, then other people do the same. And in their view, I am other people.

By then it was my turn at the baker’s. I politely asked for a brown loaf and one with raisins (love those). But as I was walking out and passed the school children sitting outside enjoying their sandwiches and baguettes, I was still thinking about my paradoxical conclusion of me being other people. Logic then dictated that if hell is other people, than hell is me too. Or in the words of a T-shirt the biggest bully in our old neighbourhood used to wear: ‘Save the world, kill yourself’. And only then I realise how ironic it is that I often secretly wished he would follow his own advice.