Karen Is Not Just a Woman: This Should Not Be Happening to Me
For most of my adult life, the system has worked quietly in my favor.
Borders. Police. Offices. Forms. Queues. Officials.
I pass through without friction. Nobody hesitates. Nobody asks a second question. The machine hums, stamps the paper, waves me on.
You don’t consciously think, this is how the world works. That would be crude.
It settles lower than thought. In the nervous system.
And then one day, it doesn’t.
No sirens, no accusation. Just a routine interruption. And for a brief moment something strange happens inside. Not fear. Not guilt.
Indignation.
A thought arrives, uninvited and fully formed:
This should not be happening to me.
That was the moment I recognized the pattern.
Not as a meme. Not as a caricature. Not as a personality type.
“This should not be happening to me” is a psychological event. A short circuit. The instant when expectation collides with reality and the ego rushes in to explain the discrepancy.
It is not born from malice.
It is born from calibration error.
If you glide through systems long enough, you internalize cooperation as the baseline. Smooth passage stops feeling contingent. It becomes normal. Quietly deserved, though you would never say it out loud.
So when friction finally appears, it doesn’t register as inconvenience.
It registers as injustice. As a violation of the natural order.
The system, after all, has always recognized you.
When it doesn’t, the mind scrambles for meaning. Something must be wrong. Someone must be incompetent. The clerk. The officer. The rule. The process. Anything but the assumption itself.
This is where the mode activates.
The voice sharpens. The tone moralizes. The situation inflates. What could have remained a minor procedural encounter becomes a symbolic struggle. Dignity is at stake. Respect is being denied. A line must be drawn.
What’s striking is who this reaction comes from.
Not from those who deal with the system daily as an adversary. Not from people who are routinely stopped, questioned, delayed, doubted. They develop a different relationship to institutions. They don’t expect fairness. They negotiate. They adapt. They endure.
Those people are not shocked.
The anger here isn’t about the stop. It’s about the collapse of an unspoken contract:
I am legible. I am harmless. I am not the one you interrupt.
Standing there, I felt the beginning of it. The impulse to explain myself unnecessarily. To signal normality. To subtly assert status.
And then I saw it.
The script.
The performance waiting to happen.
So I stopped.
Not because the officer deserved special credit. Not because the system had suddenly become just. But because the moment was instructive. The discomfort wasn’t imposed from outside. It was generated internally, by a misalignment between expectation and reality.
“This should not be happening to me” is what happens when that misalignment goes unexamined.
The deeper irony is this: a society built on the idea that citizens do not owe spontaneous explanations to authority still runs on systems that constantly demand legibility. From a libertarian point of view, the burden of justification should run upward, not downward. The state should have reasons. The citizen should not have to improvise them on the spot.
In theory, that remains true.
In practice, we live inside probabilistic systems staffed by human beings having ordinary days. Officers notice things. Algorithms flag patterns. Sometimes nothing is wrong at all. Sometimes a hunch, a routine, or simple fatigue is enough.
That doesn’t make the stop philosophically sound.
It does make it intelligible.
The mistake is not objecting, internally, to the premise. The mistake is letting that objection metastasize into outrage, into theater, into moral inflation.
That’s where the pattern appears.
Not as a defense of liberty, but as a wounded expectation demanding restoration.
The more precise move is to hold two thoughts at once: that you do not owe the system an account of your existence, and that the system will occasionally demand one anyway.
Seeing that tension clearly is what prevents the slide into performance.
You don’t have to accept the legitimacy of every interruption. You only have to notice when your reaction has stopped being about principle and started being about surprise.
The moment I caught myself wasn’t submission.
It was calibration.
This reaction isn’t born from defending liberty.
It’s born from mistaking smooth passage for a guarantee.
Once you see that, you can hold your ground without raising your voice.