Why People Are Such a Disappointment

By Matthew Parish

Saturday 19 September 2026

There comes a point in almost every thoughtful life at which one begins to suspect that the principal difficulty with humanity is human beings. Ideas can be beautiful. Institutions can be designed with elegance. Moral principles can be expressed with crystalline simplicity. Constitutions may proclaim liberty, religions compassion, universities truth and corporations integrity. Then people arrive, and everything becomes considerably more complicated.

This is not necessarily an argument for misanthropy. To say that people are disappointing is not to say that they are uniformly wicked. Indeed wickedness would, in a peculiar way, be less disappointing. If human beings were straightforwardly evil then we could arrange our expectations accordingly. The disappointment arises because they are capable of being so much better. They understand courage yet are frequently cowardly. They admire honesty yet lie when honesty becomes inconvenient. They praise loyalty until loyalty becomes expensive. They recognise injustice with extraordinary sensitivity when it is inflicted upon themselves and with remarkable difficulty when they are its beneficiaries.

Disappointment is therefore a phenomenon born of possibility. We are not disappointed when a stone fails to be compassionate or when a dog cannot understand Kant. We are disappointed in people precisely because we know that they possess the capacities required to behave differently.

The tragedy of expectations

Arthur Schopenhauer thought that much human unhappiness arose from the restless operation of the will. We desire something, suffer because we do not possess it, obtain it and shortly thereafter discover another object of desire. Human existence oscillates between dissatisfaction and boredom because desire has no natural terminus. There is always another promotion, another lover, another house, another victory and another enemy.

Something similar occurs in our expectations of other people. We construct models of them. We imagine that because somebody has behaved generously once, generosity is part of his character. Because somebody has told us an uncomfortable truth, we conclude that she is honest. Because a friend stood beside us during one crisis, we assume that friendship will survive the next. Gradually we cease to perceive the person before us and instead interact with an idealised model assembled from selected evidence.

Then reality intervenes.

The generous man becomes selfish when the stakes rise. The honest woman discovers an exception to honesty when her career is threatened. The loyal colleague changes sides after calculating where advantage lies. The friend who promised to be there suddenly becomes terribly busy. What hurts is often not the behaviour itself but the collapse of the model. We discover that we were maintaining a theory of another person that the evidence could no longer sustain.

Yet there is an uncomfortable complication. Other people are doing precisely the same thing to us.

They too have constructed simplified versions of our personalities. They imagine us braver, kinder, cleverer, more reliable or more principled than we actually are. Eventually we disappoint them as well. The tragedy of human relations consists partly in the collision between imaginary people who exist in our minds and complicated people who exist in the world.

Knowing the good is not enough

Socrates famously associated virtue with knowledge. The thought has an extraordinary appeal: if people genuinely understood what was good, surely they would do it. Much of western education rests implicitly upon this assumption. We teach people ethics, history, civics and law in the hope that knowledge will improve conduct.

Unfortunately, people possess an astonishing capacity to know what is right while doing something else.

The corrupt politician seldom believes corruption to be admirable in principle. The adulterer rarely proposes adultery as a universal moral rule. The dishonest businessman does not generally teach his children that dishonesty is a virtue. People instead construct exceptions around themselves. They develop elaborate narratives explaining why the ordinary rules do not quite apply in their particular circumstances.

This may be humanity’s greatest intellectual talent: rationalisation.

Human intelligence did not evolve principally so that professors could discover the foundations of mathematics or philosophers could investigate the nature of consciousness. It evolved because intelligence helped organisms survive complicated social environments. A significant part of intelligence therefore consists of explaining ourselves to other people and, perhaps even more importantly, explaining ourselves to ourselves.

We are extraordinarily gifted defence lawyers for our own conduct.

The selfish decision becomes prudence. Cowardice becomes realism. Betrayal becomes recognising that circumstances have changed. Greed becomes ambition. Cruelty becomes firmness. Laziness becomes protecting one’s mental health. Vanity becomes self-respect. The vocabulary changes while the underlying motives remain comfortably intact.

The weakness of character

The Greeks had a useful word for one dimension of this problem: akrasia, usually translated as weakness of will. A person may know what he ought to do and nevertheless fail to do it. This elementary observation destroys a great many optimistic theories of humanity.

Most moral failures are not spectacular. Few people wake in the morning intending to become villains. Human deterioration generally proceeds through increments so small that each one can be justified. A compromise is made because the consequences of refusing it seem excessive. A lie is told because the truth would create unnecessary trouble. Somebody remains silent because speaking would accomplish nothing. Another person is abandoned because helping her would impose an unreasonable burden.

Each decision can be explained. Then, after enough such explanations, a character has been constructed.

This is why courage is so rare and why genuine courage is often surprisingly mundane. Courage does not principally consist of charging machine-gun positions or rescuing children from burning buildings. Those are extreme manifestations of it. Everyday courage consists of accepting a disadvantage rather than violating a principle when nobody would particularly blame you for taking the easier course.

That is precisely why people disappoint us. The easier course is usually very easy indeed.

Groups make matters worse

Individual human beings can be disappointing. Groups of human beings have the capacity to become appalling.

Nietzsche understood the dangers of the herd, although his conclusions were often deliberately provocative. Gustave Le Bon explored the psychology of crowds. Hannah Arendt examined the frightening ordinariness with which bureaucratic structures can transform moral responsibility into administrative procedure. Stanley Milgram’s experiments, whatever debates surround their interpretation, became famous because they appeared to reveal how readily ordinary people might defer to perceived authority.

Groups permit responsibility to evaporate.

A person who would hesitate to perform an unpleasant act individually may participate enthusiastically when everybody else appears to approve. Committees make decisions that none of their members would wish personally to defend. Bureaucracies produce outcomes for which everybody is responsible in some infinitesimal proportion and therefore nobody feels responsible at all.

The language changes accordingly. Nobody decided to sack the employee; the organisation underwent restructuring. Nobody abandoned the vulnerable person; resources had to be prioritised. Nobody chose to permit a catastrophe; procedures were followed. The passive voice is one of civilisation’s most effective moral anaesthetics.

Institutions magnify this tendency because institutions possess purposes independent of the individuals working within them. Universities that proclaim intellectual freedom become frightened of controversy. Governments established to protect liberty accumulate mechanisms of surveillance. Charities become concerned with preserving themselves. Companies founded by iconoclasts acquire compliance departments whose purpose is to prevent iconoclasm.

None of this necessarily requires bad people. That is what makes it disturbing. Ordinary incentives are sufficient.

People want to be liked

Much human disappointment can be explained by one embarrassingly simple fact: people desperately want other people to approve of them.

The desire for social acceptance is ancient and powerful. For most of human history, expulsion from one’s community could amount to a death sentence. Our nervous systems therefore treat social rejection with a seriousness that modern circumstances may not justify. We fear embarrassment, exclusion and ridicule with an intensity disproportionate to their objective consequences.

Hence people conform.

They laugh at jokes they do not find funny. They profess enthusiasm for ideas they privately consider ridiculous. They adopt the vocabulary of whichever group surrounds them. They become courageous when courage is fashionable and silent when courage is dangerous. They may even convince themselves that their opinions have changed, because consciously maintaining a distinction between one’s private beliefs and one’s public behaviour is psychologically uncomfortable.

This explains one of the strangest features of human societies. Entire groups can consist of individuals privately sceptical about propositions that everybody publicly affirms. Each person looks at everyone else, observes apparent agreement and concludes that he must be the eccentric.

The disappointment here is especially acute because we like to imagine people as autonomous moral agents. Frequently they are weather vanes with elaborate autobiographies.

Friendship and the arithmetic of inconvenience

Friendship provides perhaps the purest laboratory for human disappointment because friendship is supposed to transcend calculation. Aristotle distinguished friendships of utility, pleasure and virtue. The highest friendship exists between people who value one another for who they are rather than merely for what they provide.

Such friendships exist. Their rarity is precisely what makes them precious.

A great many relationships that appear to be friendships are actually arrangements of mutual convenience. This is not necessarily cynical. People enjoy one another’s company, exchange favours, provide professional opportunities, share interests and offer emotional reassurance. Nothing about this is objectionable.

The test arrives when the arithmetic changes.

Illness, disgrace, poverty, political unpopularity, professional failure, war or simple prolonged misfortune can transform a pleasant friendship into an obligation. The person who once contributed amusement and companionship now requires patience, money, advocacy or risk. At this point the distinction between friendship and association becomes visible.

People who disappear during catastrophe often return when circumstances improve. They may even behave as though nothing happened. In their own minds perhaps nothing did. They were busy. Circumstances were difficult. They did not know what to say. They assumed somebody else was helping.

Again the explanations are endless.

War removes the decoration

War teaches unusually harsh lessons about human beings because it strips away many of the conventions that ordinarily conceal character. Peace permits almost everyone to imagine himself courageous. War sends an invoice.

In wartime the difference between proclaimed principles and actual commitments becomes painfully measurable. People who speak passionately about patriotism may leave when danger approaches. Others who have never spoken patriotically may remain. Some exploit shortages. Some steal humanitarian assistance. Some betray neighbours. Some become petty tyrants because somebody has finally given them a uniform and a little authority.

Yet war reveals the opposite as well.

People shelter strangers. Doctors work through bombardments. Volunteers drive towards places from which everyone else is fleeing. Soldiers return to positions they know may kill them. Railway workers keep trains running. Elderly women feed people they have never met. People give away money they cannot afford to lose and accept risks nobody could reasonably require them to accept.

This is important because disappointment must not become blindness. The same species that produces cowards produces heroes. Often the difference cannot be predicted in advance.

Perhaps disappointment is necessary

There is a temptation, after sufficient encounters with human weakness, to lower one’s expectations to zero. Never trust anybody, expect selfishness and you will never again be disappointed. This philosophy possesses the advantage of psychological efficiency.

It also produces a miserable life.

Cynicism protects against betrayal by ensuring that trust is never offered. It prevents disappointment by eliminating hope. The cynic congratulates himself upon understanding humanity while quietly constructing circumstances in which humanity can never surprise him favourably.

There is another possibility.

Perhaps disappointment is not evidence that expectations were foolish but evidence that expectations matter. We are disappointed by cowardice because courage exists. We are angered by dishonesty because truthfulness is possible. Betrayal wounds us because loyalty is real. Hypocrisy infuriates us because principles need not be abandoned when they become inconvenient.

Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy was demanding precisely because he refused to reduce ethics to predictions about ordinary behaviour. The fact that people frequently fail to act from duty does not abolish duty. Moral standards describe what rational beings ought to do, not what opinion polls reveal that they normally do.

There is dignity in maintaining standards even after discovering how frequently people fail to meet them.

The unbearable complexity of another person

There is, however, one final source of disappointment worth considering. We may simply ask too much of people. Every human being is carrying an interior world invisible to everyone else. A colleague who appears indifferent may be terrified. A friend who withdraws may be exhausted. A person who behaves selfishly may have spent years giving more than anybody noticed. The external evidence from which we construct moral judgements is radically incomplete.

This does not excuse everything. Understanding can become another form of rationalisation if stretched indefinitely. Some acts really are cowardly, cruel or dishonest and sophistication should not prevent us from saying so.

Nevertheless, maturity may consist partly in learning to distinguish judgement from condemnation. We can recognise that somebody failed without concluding that failure exhausts his identity. We can acknowledge betrayal without imagining that the betrayer has never performed an act of loyalty. Human beings are inconsistent because personality is not a single mechanism. We contain appetites, principles, fears, habits, memories and impulses that compete for control.

We are less like coherent philosophical systems than badly governed coalitions.

The people who do not disappoint us

Eventually, after enough years, one’s understanding of humanity may become both darker and kinder. The darkness comes from abandoning illusions. Most people are not heroes. Principles often bend under pressure. Loyalty has limits. Institutions protect themselves. Crowds are dangerous. Vanity is universal. Self-interest possesses an extraordinary ability to dress itself in the language of morality.

The kindness comes from recognising that these weaknesses belong to us too.

Then something curious happens. The people who behave well become more impressive rather than less. An honest person is remarkable precisely because lying would sometimes benefit him. A courageous person matters because fear is real. A loyal friend becomes precious because departure was available. A person who refuses to exploit another’s vulnerability deserves admiration because exploitation would have been easy.

Goodness without temptation would be merely programming.

Perhaps this is why people remain worth the trouble. Humanity disappoints because humanity promises so much. We glimpse in one another intelligence, courage, tenderness, humour, loyalty and extraordinary generosity, and then we watch those qualities disappear beneath fear, vanity, conformity and appetite. We become furious because we know what might have been.

Yet every so often somebody does the difficult thing.

Somebody stays when leaving would be easier. Somebody tells the truth when lying would be profitable. Somebody refuses an instruction because it is wrong. Somebody remembers a friend whom everyone else has forgotten. Somebody enters the burning building, drives towards the bombardment, admits the mistake, forgives the unforgivable or simply keeps a promise long after keeping it has ceased to offer any advantage.

These people ruin misanthropy. They demonstrate that our disappointment was justified because our expectations were not entirely imaginary. Human beings really are capable of the qualities we demand of them. They merely fail, with maddening regularity, to display them.

And perhaps that is the most frustrating truth about people. They are not disappointing because they cannot be better. They are disappointing because, every now and again, they prove that they can.