The People Everyone Talks About … But No One Wants to Become

There’s a certain kind of sentence people use when they want to create distance. You’ve probably heard it before, maybe even used it yourself without thinking much about it.

“You know… those people.”

It’s rarely said with curiosity or compassion. Most of the time it’s said casually, almost as if the meaning is obvious to everyone in the room. The phrase acts like shorthand for an entire category of people we’ve decided we already understand: Those people believe that. Those people live like that. Those people are ruining everything.

The phrase is incredibly efficient. In just two words, it creates a border between us and them. It gives us a way to organize the world when things feel chaotic or confusing. Humans have always done this. When the world feels complicated, we simplify it, divide it, categorize it, and draw lines. And if we’re honest, all of us do it.

We do it when we’re frustrated or when we’re angry. Sometimes we do it when we’re simply tired of trying to understand people who think differently than we do. Labeling someone as “those people” allows us to close the case quickly. It gives us permission to stop listening. But over the years I’ve begun to notice something strange about that phrase. The longer you live, the more likely you are to become one of them.

At some point in your life, someone will disagree with you deeply enough that you stop being a person to them. Instead, you become a category, a stereotype, a symbol of something they oppose. In their story, you are no longer a complex human being shaped by years of experience and moments of growth. You are simply one of those people.

When that happens, something subtle but important disappears — your story. The thousands of small moments that shaped you — like the conversations that changed your mind, the quiet struggles you fought alone, the experiences that made you reconsider what you once believed — all of that complexity fades into the background. What remains is the label.

It’s one of the oldest habits in human history: turning complicated people into simple ideas. Ideas are easier to argue with, easier to criticize, and easier to dismiss. But people are rarely simple.

People contradict themselves — They grow, learn things the hard way, and carry invisible histories that shape how they see the world. When we reduce someone to a category, we erase all of that complexity and flatten a human life into a caricature that fits neatly inside our assumptions.

The older I get, the more fascinated I become with the stories hiding behind those assumptions: The person you thought had everything figured out but was quietly falling apart. The person you assumed was arrogant but was actually protecting years of insecurity. The person you dismissed as stubborn who might simply have been shaped by a life experience you never had.

Everyone has a story, but stories are inconvenient in a world that prefers certainty. Certainty is comfortable. It gives us the reassuring feeling that we understand how the world works and where we stand inside it. Stories, on the other hand, tend to complicate things. They blur the lines we’ve drawn. They make villains look human and heroes look fragile. They force us to confront the possibility that most people are not simply good or bad, right or wrong.

Most people are simply human, and humans are complicated. We stumble through life doing the best we can with the perspective we’ve been given. Sometimes that perspective expands as we learn from others. Sometimes it hardens as we hold tighter to what we already believe. Either way, every belief, every opinion, every worldview has been shaped by a story. That’s why storytelling matters so much.

Stories slow us down. They force us to see people not as categories but as individuals. They remind us that every person we meet is standing on top of a lifetime of moments we can’t see. These are the moments that shaped their fears, their convictions, and the way they interpret the world.

The truth is that no one wakes up one morning and decides to become the villain in someone else’s story. Most people are simply trying to navigate life with the tools they were given. Some succeed. Some struggle. Most of us do a little of both. And somewhere along the way, whether we realize it or not, we eventually become the kind of person someone else points at and calls those people. When that happens, the label begins to feel different.

You start to see how much of your own story disappears inside those two words. You realize how easily someone can misunderstand you. You realize how quickly complexity fades when someone decides they already know who you are. That realization raises a difficult question.

If it feels unfair when it happens to us, why are we so quick to do it to everyone else? That question has been sitting with me for a long time. Long enough that I began paying closer attention to the stories hiding behind the labels we use so casually — The stories behind disagreements, behind assumptions, and behind the people we think we already understand. The more I listened, the more I realized something surprising: The distance between us and those people is often much smaller than we think.

Sometimes the difference comes down to perspective. Sometimes it’s timing. Sometimes it’s simply the collection of life experiences that shaped us before we ever met each other. The line between us and them is rarely as clear as we imagine. That realization eventually grew into a larger exploration for me — an ongoing project that asks what happens when we stop labeling people long enough to hear their stories. That exploration has slowly taken shape as a book I’ve been writing called Those People.

It isn’t really about them. It’s about all of us.

It’s about the assumptions we make, the labels we carry, and the stories we overlook when we believe we already understand someone. Because if we’re honest, the line separating us from those people was never as solid as we thought. And sometimes the most important stories begin right where that line starts to blur.