We’ve all been there. You’re in a coffee shop, and someone is talking loudly on a speakerphone, oblivious to the glares. You’re in a meeting, and a colleague dismisses another’s idea with a blunt, crushing remark. On the road, a driver makes a recklessly selfish maneuver. Our immediate, internal label often clicks into place: asshole.
But what if we’re misdiagnosing the condition? What if a significant portion of what we categorize as sheer, unadulterated jerkiness is actually something far more universal and temporary: youth? Not just chronological youth, but a kind of emotional and experiential youth that can linger well past our twenties.Think of the human psyche as a vast, uncharted territory. We are not born with a map; we are born drawing it with every interaction, every consequence, every scrap of feedback. The young—in age or in spirit—are often navigating with a tragically incomplete draft. They lack the data points that come from years of living: the visceral memory of causing real hurt and regretting it, the humbling experience of profound failure, the slow understanding that the world does not, in fact, revolve around them.
This map-making phase explains so much. The apparent arrogance is often just a brittle overconfidence papering over a deep uncertainty. The blunt honesty isn’t malice, but a lack of practice in the nuanced art of diplomacy. The selfish decisions aren’t always born from a place of contempt for others, but from a myopic focus on their own immediate needs or desires—a tunnel vision they haven’t yet learned to widen. They are, in a sense, the center of their own tiny universe because they haven’t had enough time or cause to step outside and see the broader galaxy of other people’s inner lives.
This isn’t to excuse truly cruel or malicious behavior. Some people are, indeed, just unkind. But the garden-variety, frustrating, “how can you be so clueless?” behavior that peppers daily life? That’s frequently a byproduct of an unfinished self. Empathy isn’t just a switch you flip on; it’s a muscle built through repetition, through hearing stories unlike your own, through loving and losing, through being the outlier in a room. Perspective is earned, often through the quiet, humbling toll of time.
The beautiful, hopeful part of this reframe is that it implies growth and redemption. The impatient young manager who steamrolls his team may, in a decade, become a mentor who listens first, because he’s finally lived through the fallout of his earlier style. The friend who was spectacularly self-absorbed at twenty-five might become your most supportive ally at forty, after life has sanded down some of her sharper edges. They weren’t fixed entities of “jerk”; they were works-in-progress.
So the next time you encounter that grating, frustrating behavior, pause. Before you cement that label, consider the possibility that you are not looking at a character flaw, but at a developmental stage. You might be witnessing a person who simply hasn’t yet had the life required to become… otherwise. This doesn’t mean you have to tolerate bad behavior. Boundaries are still essential. But it can drain the anger from the moment and replace it with something more useful: a measured patience, or even the quiet confidence that time is the greatest teacher of all. They’ll likely get there. After all, if we’re honest, most of us are just former versions of our own younger, less-mapped selves, cringing at the memory of the assholes we used to be.