The Invisibility of Men Gone Bad
I’m a big fan of Uber Eats.
When I’m working. When I don’t want to go outside. When I just want frictionless continuity in my day. I’ve placed hundreds—maybe thousands—of orders over the years.
And here’s something unsettling:
I can’t remember a single delivery person’s name. Or face. Not one.
I tipped every time. Reliably. Automatically.
But cognitively, socially—they were invisible to me.
That’s not a moral confession. It’s a structural observation.
What’s strange is that the names and profiles I see delivering food look indistinguishable from the names and profiles we later see attached to acts of random violence.
Same demographic outlines.
Same anonymity.
Same social erasure.
And I think we’ve completely lost the plot in how we talk about this.
Invisibility Is Not Neutral
There’s growing evidence that over 80% of men receive little to no consistent validation in daily life—not praise, not acknowledgment, not even basic micro-recognition. No “seen,” no “good job,” no social feedback loop that says: you exist and you matter here.
Now layer on top of that:
being new to a country
lacking of a network
weak social bonds
working in roles where you are functionally invisible
You end up with a human system running at zero signal.
And when validation goes to zero, resentment doesn’t rise linearly.
It compounds.
Disgust with the world doesn’t emerge because someone is “evil.”
It emerges because there is no reciprocal recognition at all.
Random vs. Directed Anger
Here’s something uncomfortable but important:
If you look historically at serial killers or targeted assassins, many of them—across races and eras—had more validation than we assume.
Twisted, yes.
But socially legible.
Seen.
Sometimes even admired in certain circles.
Their violence was directed. A warped sense of opposition. A target.
Random violence, by contrast, often comes from people who don’t feel opposed by the world—they feel erased by it.
That doesn’t excuse anything.
But it does change where responsibility and prevention should be aimed.
What We Refuse to See
We’ve built an economy where millions of people move through our lives as interfaces, not humans. They deliver. They disappear. No memory trace. No relational residue.
And then we act shocked when some of those same people feel no allegiance to a society that never reflected them back to themselves.
This applies across race.
Across countries.
Across ideologies.
I’m not offering absolution.
I’m trying to understand root causes—because without that, we’re just reacting forever.