I’m here in Los Angeles visiting my family for the holidays. I’ve been able to borrow my brother’s car to drive to In-N-Out, hiking, or wherever else I want to go, but I hate driving. I’ve never liked it, and it stresses me out like crazy.

When I’m behind the wheel, it seems like every couple of minutes I witness someone driving way too fast, people trying to last-minute exit freeways, and just general reckless behavior. I don’t get road rage—I get road anxiety. It’s not just the dangerous stuff I dislike about driving, though. There’s something dystopian and sinister about people hidden in these isolated, fast-moving metal cans, trying to get from one place to another as efficiently as possible. A human factor gets lost in this LA-style driving. We all want to get there as fast as possible, and yet here we all are, sitting in traffic on the 405.

I’ve been thinking about this in relation to Brian Thompson’s murder and the arrest of Luigi Mangione.

When I first saw the headlines, I didn’t think much of it—just another dude getting killed, meh. It wasn’t until a few days later, while I was browsing Reddit, that I started paying more attention. It surprised me how much support the anonymous killer was getting. I read countless Reddit comments expressing their glee that Brian was “offed,” wishing more CEOs would follow the same path, and I saw the same jokes over and over, saying their sympathy was “out of network.”

There was something fascinating about all of this, but I couldn’t put my finger on it at first. I thought it was uncanny that the frustration with the healthcare system (“they see us as numbers on a spreadsheet”) sounded similar to how the same group of people were expressing that frustration (“he’s just another soulless CEO”). Over time, I realized that the very people who claimed Brian’s death was an act of justice were, in their own way, dehumanizing the victim. In their anonymous posts, Brian became just a symbol of all CEOs and all that is wrong with corporate America.

When Luigi was revealed as the suspect, the zeitgeist continued to embrace him as a relatable person, even doubling down on it. They focused on the Luigi who loved reading and posted his reviews on GoodReads. The Luigi who traveled to Japan with a trendy minimalist backpack. The Luigi who was eating a hash brown at McDonald’s when he was approached by the police. The Luigi who suffered from severe back pain.

When I speak of the zeitgeist, I include myself. I found myself going down rabbit holes of threads and articles trying to piece together Luigi’s life story and understand what happened. I didn’t do the same for Brian.

Is there harm in making memes about one person and feeling compassion for another? The more I reflect on it, the more I’m convinced there is. Dehumanizing even one person sets the stage for justifying harm. Reducing someone to their role means you’ve “othered” them, and there’s danger in seeing people through this limited lens. Throughout history, this slippery slope has led to suffering en masse.

The collective anger with the healthcare system and the CEO’s role is absolutely valid—no one should be reduced to a KPI in a quarterly shareholder meeting, and these systems need reform. But what I’ve suddenly realized is this way of thinking… the “company mindset” – is everywhere in modern life.

I’m not sure what to call it, but the way I see it is this: The “company mindset” is the idea that people are faceless, interchangeable parts within a larger system, and it has become deeply ingrained in our society. I see it in myself as well. Remember in high school when you learned about the Industrial Revolution and Eli Whitney’s idea of making muskets from standardized parts so they could be replaced and repaired more easily? It’s basically that. A company is a group of individuals, but the company itself becomes an entity that must persist, even if any single individual is removed.

It’s not just large corporations, but something like the healthcare system as well. The system is intentionally set up so that everyone—whether it’s the CEO or a nurse—becomes a cog in the machine. Some people are more complicit than others, but the reality is that these systems were built a long time ago, and they continue because people (that’s us, by the way) are participating in them. We, as individuals, are often left to navigate these imperfect systems, which are so monolithic and draining that we often don’t have the time or energy to question the roles we play in them.

Can’t you see that thumbs-upping a meme about a CEO’s death is, in the grand scheme of things, just as harmful as denying someone the surgery they desperately need?

I don’t know about you, but when I drive on the freeway, it’s easy to forget there are real people in the cars around me. I see headlights and metal boxes, not human faces, and in that separation, it’s all too easy to treat others as obstacles and inconveniences rather than fellow humans.

It’s a scary thought that this “company thinking” has become a way of life even when we’re off the clock, but here’s the thing: We are the system. It’s only us here, and we have the power to make change by how we engage with others in the system, in everything we do. For me, that means trying to understand my colleague’s point of view instead of letting our differences frustrate me. Or it can mean being kinder to the phone support person who is trying their best to help me out but is taking way too long (I’m sorry, Chase employee I hung up on!).

Do you believe it’s possible to have systems that truly support us as individual human beings? I believe in this, and I think each of us has the ability to help create those new systems.

I feel grateful that each day, and each moment, offers me a chance to contribute to the changes I yearn to see.