Everyone's a Karen (and How Not to Be)

Pax

Pax

April 26, 2026 · 12 min read

A woman in her fifties is standing at a flight desk at LaGuardia. Her flight has been canceled. The agent has just told her, in the slow voice of someone working a double, that there is no flight tonight and the hotel voucher list is exhausted.

She raises her voice. “I want to speak to your manager.”

Three phones come out. A clip is online by morning, captioned “another Karen meltdown.” Seven million views by lunch.

The meme is everywhere. What’s interesting is what’s going on underneath it.

Which isn’t really a Karen problem at all. It’s a human one. The people who never appear in these videos are doing it too, often without a phone in their face. The work below is for everyone. And especially for the people who don’t think it’s about them.

Where the term actually came from

The label has a longer history than most people realize.

The earliest pop-culture seed is usually traced to Dane Cook’s 2005 stand-up bit “The Friend Nobody Likes,” in which the unwanted member of every friend group is named Karen. From there it sat dormant in the meme reservoir for over a decade. In 2017 a viral Reddit post about a man’s grievances with his ex-wife (also named Karen) gave rise to the subreddit r/F**YouKaren*, and the name began to attach itself to a specific style of complaint.

The term broke out of internet niche and into mainstream usage in 2020. Aja Romano, writing for Vox, traced its evolution from a generic reference to demanding women to a label specifically tied to viral incidents in which White women called the police on Black people for innocuous reasons. The Central Park dog-leash confrontation that year, in which a White woman called 911 on a Black birdwatcher who had asked her to leash her dog, became the moment the term locked into public consciousness.

So the meme has at least three distinct flavors layered on top of each other:

These three things are not the same. Weaponizing the police against an innocent person is a different kind of act than being unkind in a coffee line. Treating them as equivalent is one of the things the meme does badly. The 911 version has a moral and legal answer this post won’t soften. The work below is about the everyday version.

What’s wrong with the label

Plenty of thoughtful people have pointed out that the label has gone sideways.

The Columbia linguist John McWhorter argued in The Atlantic in 2020 that “Karen” had become a slur — a term that names a person as worthy of contempt without the listener needing to evaluate the underlying behavior. Once a word does that work, you can apply it to anyone you want to dismiss. The label flattens.

If you’ve ever flinched at a “don’t be a Karen” aimed at a woman who was lodging a perfectly reasonable complaint at a restaurant, advocating for her child at a school meeting, or asserting a boundary — you were noticing the flatten as it happened. That flinch is a sharp instinct to evaluate the behavior rather than the label.

It also runs heavily gendered, and the data we have points in the wrong direction. Christine Pearson, Lynne Andersson, and Christine Porath’s foundational 2000 workplace-incivility study found that instigators were more than twice as likely to be male as female, and men were seven times more likely to be incivil toward someone of lower status. Lilia Cortina at the University of Michigan calls this pattern “selective incivility”: uncivil treatment is more often aimed at women than coming from them. Viral clips just tend to feature women. Someone has tried to make “Kyle” happen, and “Ken,” and “Kevin.” None of them stuck.

The meme punches in the wrong direction, and it punches at a fairly specific cohort. A 2019 Sachs Media analysis of Florida voter rolls found that the prototypical Karen was 58 years old and white, which tracks more closely with when the name peaked (the 1960s) than with anything about that woman’s behavior. She is, for almost any reader of this post, somebody’s mother, grandmother, or older sister, often the one carrying more of the family’s cognitive load than anyone notices.

And it can be used to silence. “Don’t be a Karen” has become a way to shame anyone, but particularly women, out of complaining. Sometimes that’s appropriate. Sometimes the complaint is real and the dismissal is the unkindness.

You can hold all of that as true and still notice that something is being named. The label is messy. The behavior is real.

The pattern beneath the meme

What the meme is reaching for has a clinical name: customer incivility. The research on it is unflattering to all of us.

Christine Porath, a management researcher at Georgetown, and her collaborator Christine Pearson have published the most-cited work on it. In Mastering Civility (2016), Porath summarizes their findings: incivility is contagious, it tanks the well-being of the person on the receiving end for hours afterward, and it bleeds into the rest of that person’s day in ways that affect everyone they encounter next. The barista you snap at is shorter with the next customer, and that customer is shorter with their assistant, and the wave moves through the world in ways you never see.

Daniel Skarlicki at the University of British Columbia has shown something more uncomfortable: customers who mistreat service workers tend to feel justified about it in the moment, and only retroactively recognize the asymmetry. The clinical term is “moral disengagement.” The everyday version sounds like they should have done their job better, which the brain manufactures faster than it manufactures regret.

Susan Fiske at Princeton, working with Amy Cuddy and Peter Glick, mapped the way humans automatically rate strangers along two axes: warmth and competence. The mapping is fast (under a second), and once it locks, it shapes everything we do next. The cashier rated low on competence (they’re slow) and low on warmth (they’re not smiling) becomes, momentarily, less than fully human in the part of our brain that’s running the interaction. We’re not aware this is happening. We just notice that we’re suddenly more curt than we’d be with a peer.

The asymmetry is the part to sit with. Most people are pleasant to their boss, polite to their friends, and meaningfully worse to anyone in a position where they can’t push back. Hostage negotiators stay regulated under conditions where someone’s life is on the line. The same brain that can do that loses it over a coffee order, because the coffee order has no consequences. The brain saves its regulation for situations that punish dysregulation. Service interactions don’t punish you in the moment, so the brain doesn’t bother.

The meme is reaching for that asymmetry. It just keeps grabbing the wrong demographic by the collar.

The stress argument, and what it does and doesn’t do

Some of the most interesting research on this behavior is about when people do it, and the answer is: when they’re depleted.

People are worse to service workers when they’re tired. They’re worse when they’re hungry. They’re worse during the school year than during summer if they have school-aged kids. They’re worse the week before payday. They’re worse on Mondays. They’re meaningfully worse when their executive function is depleted, when the part of the brain that says don’t do that has been running all day and is out of fuel.

Many populations live close to that line. Working parents. Shift workers. People caring for aging parents on top of everything else. Anyone whose schedule produces chronic cognitive load. Sociologist Allison Daminger’s much-cited 2019 paper documented that women in heterosexual households tend to carry more of the cognitive labor of running family life (anticipating needs, planning, keeping the calendar in their head) than their male partners; Eve Rodsky’s Fair Play (2019) makes the same point in book form. That’s one well-documented depleted population. There are many others. The mechanism doesn’t pick a gender; it picks a depleted brain.

The cashier doesn’t know any of that. The cashier sees a person who is being unkind. The cashier’s day gets harder. The cashier’s next customer gets less of them. The wave moves outward, and somewhere down the line a tired cashier is short with someone who is also having a hard day, and the cycle widens.

Both things can be true. The reasons matter for understanding ourselves. The reasons do not matter to the person standing across the counter from us. Holding both makes it easier to extend grace to ourselves later, and harder to use that grace as a permission slip.

The honest position is something like: I am the kind of person who can lose my regulation when I am tired and overloaded, and that is exactly when I most need to notice it.

How to catch yourself

There’s a kind of self-awareness that travels with you into the moments your regulation is fraying. It isn’t a personality trait. It’s a habit of noticing, built one rep at a time. The reflex you may already have — seeing someone else get called a Karen and asking yourself wait, do I do that? instead of feeling vindicated — is the same muscle, turned inward. A few things help train it.

Take the stress audit before you walk in. A surprising amount of public incivility happens because people don’t realize how depleted they are when they enter the interaction. A 30-second check before walking into the pharmacy, the school office, the customer-service line: How tired am I right now? How hungry? How much reserve do I have left? If the honest answers add up to “not much in the tank,” consider whether the errand can wait. When it can’t, adjust your own expectations of yourself for the next ten minutes. And maybe even name it to the person you’re about to talk to: “I’ve had a long day, sorry if I’m a little short.” People who know they’re running on fumes hold themselves to a different standard than people who think they’re fine.

Use the cashier’s name. It sounds small. The research on it is not small. Naming a person, even reading their name tag once, pulls them up the warmth-and-competence map in the part of your brain that decides how to treat them. It’s a one-second move that costs nothing and changes the next two minutes.

Notice the asymmetry test. Before you say the next sentence to a stranger, ask yourself whether you’d say it to your boss in the same tone. If the answer is no, that’s the data. The brain is correctly calculating that this person can’t push back, and is letting you off the leash. The asymmetry isn’t proof that you’re a monster. It’s proof that you’re a normal human in a stressful moment with a depleted reserve. Naming the asymmetry, even silently, restores some of the leash.

Watch for the volume and the specificity. Two early warning signs of an incivility spiral: your voice gets louder than it needs to be for the room, and your complaints get more specific than the situation warrants. (“This is the third time this has happened to me at this airline.”) The specificity is the brain building a case. Once the case is built, the next sentence is usually the one you regret.

If you slipped, repair. Almost everyone slips into incivility at some point. The people who do this work aren’t the ones who never lose it. They’re the ones who notice afterward and go back. “I was sharp with you a minute ago. I’m sorry. That wasn’t about you.” A clean repair does more than the original incivility cost, because it tells the person on the other side they weren’t crazy and they weren’t the problem. It hands them back their day.

Stop replaying it as the victim of the situation. The default rehearsal happens in the car on the way home, with the person rehearsing themselves as the wronged party. They should have known. They should have done better. That rehearsal trains the brain to do it again next time. The version that doesn’t train it: I was tired, the situation was annoying, and I was unkind to a person who didn’t deserve it. Next time I’ll catch it earlier. Boring sentences. They build something the dramatic ones don’t.

The version that doesn’t go viral

There’s a version of yourself you’d never post. It came out in a parking lot or a checkout line or a hotel lobby on a bad day. You’d be horrified to see it in a stranger’s TikTok. You’d also recognize yourself in it instantly.

That recognition is the doorway. The person who notices they’re slipping is already different from the person who doesn’t. The person who replays a bad interaction asking what they did, rather than what was done to them, has already started doing the work.

The label “Karen” is a clumsy tool. It points at a real pattern, and then it overshoots, and then it gets used to silence women who are doing nothing wrong, and then it gets used as a punchline at the expense of the wrong people. It’s not a great label. But the underlying pattern — the way humans treat people we have power over worse than the people we don’t — is universal, ancient, and worth taking personally.

If you’ve ever replayed a conversation in the car and winced at how you sounded, you’ve already met the part of yourself that does this work. That wincing is the practice.

The people who get good at this aren’t gentler by nature. They’re the ones who learned, somewhere along the way, that the cashier and the gate agent and the person at the call center are not the obstacle between them and their day. They’re somebody, with a whole day of their own. And the small choice to remember that, especially when you’re tired and the line is long and the flight is canceled, is one of the quietest forms of decency a person can practice.

That practice doesn’t require you to be calmer than you are. It requires you to notice when you aren’t.

Speak kindly. Listen closely. Paws often.

— Pax

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