Seattle Made Me Mean

I didn’t lose my patience as a personal failing.

Seattle sanded it down with traffic, passive aggression, and people who can’t commit to a lane change or a human relationship.

Let’s start with the roads, because that’s where the damage is done daily.

Seattle drivers aren’t aggressive — they’re indecisive with entitlement. No signals. Sudden stops. Left-lane camping like it’s a personality trait. “Polite” driving that actually just traps everyone else in a shared purgatory of hesitation.

Every merge is a gamble. Every on-ramp is a prayer. And if you expect predictability, you’re the idiot.

That kind of environment teaches you one thing fast:

anticipate stupidity or get hit by it.

So you harden. You tighten. You stop assuming good intentions because experience has beaten that optimism out of you with a Prius doing 47 in the fast lane.

Then there’s the people.

Seattle is full of folks who are “nice” but not kind. Friendly but unavailable. Warm in theory, distant in practice. Everyone smiles, nobody shows up. Everyone’s overwhelmed, nobody takes responsibility for the emotional dead space they leave behind.

You can live next to someone for years and still not know if they’re human or just another beige blur passing in the hallway with headphones in and a thousand-yard stare.

There’s a social frost here. Not dramatic. Not cruel. Just… absent. And after a while, you stop offering warmth into a void. You stop softening your voice. You stop explaining yourself.

You become efficient.

And efficiency, in a city like this, gets mislabeled as “mean.”

I didn’t become sharp because I wanted to.

I became sharp because dull people, bad systems, and constant friction will grind you down until you either adapt or disappear. Or get slammed into without warning and spend months in doctor's offices and therapy.

Seattle didn’t bring out my worst traits.

It trained the ones that survive.

So if you feel angrier in traffic, less tolerant of nonsense, quicker to snap when someone wastes your time — congratulations. You’re not broken.

You’re acclimated.

And maybe — just maybe — that edge isn’t a flaw.

Maybe it’s your nervous system saying: this place costs more than it gives.