"I am the passenger...

And I ride, and I ride and I ride."

Just because I love that song and love the recent T-Mobile ads set in the airport with that black guy and his awesome voice. And I couldn't think of a better title, or any title for that matter, for this post. Which will be a moan. But will not be pathetic as the last few have.

People, I've decided, are dicks, purely designed to piss each other off, and we're all bad. Everyone is a bad person, and we only have moments of building ourselves above the shitty getting-by-but-nothing-more humdrum by joking about.

And we're all like it. Everyone, no matter who you are, is all about just themselves. People just have different levels of being able to look as though they aren't all for themselves. Everything we do at a basic level is designed to make us look better to ourselves. Regardless of what you rate yourself by, be it success, salary, friends, fame or influence, everything you do is designed to make you higher in at least one of the categories.

Dress it up as much as you like, but every decision is an attempt to make you better in your eyes. Sometimes those decisions take you down a route that lots of people also agree with. That makes you popular (people who are regularly generous, for example, do it so they feel popular, because they are). Sometimes people make decisions that make them move forward (successful people, for example, are often supposed to be hard and no nonsense, leaving people behind for themselves). Fine. But even people who are neither, who genuinely just breeze by, getting on with everyone and somehow getting to the level of what they want, they too just choose things that make themselves feel better.

Someone who chooses to miss something massively important in order to help a friend, or some similar thing, take that choice because they might get something in return, or because they then convince themselves that it makes them a better person they can do something they might not have done for someone else.

It's a bitch. Sometimes it might be easier to pretend people are just nice. But mostly, they just manage to carry off the same "get-what-I-want" ferocity with a veil of polite expertise and a lot of cunning they might not even be aware they have. There are no dickheads and lovely people. Just dickheads who convince you they're gods.