Hell is other people.

Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit

When Sartre wrote this, he did not intend to mean what most people think. This line was not a commentary about other annoying people, but about identity. It was about the existential discomfort of being fixed in someone else’s gaze. In other words, other people’s perception of you has little in common with how you perceive yourself. Yet, it is that external gaze that matters. That is what you are reduced to, how you are defined and how you are (mis)understood.

Even so, I prefer the misreading because it carries its own kind of truth. Sometimes, hell is other people, especially in our professional lives.

Cast your mind over your working life. Think about the politics that you have to play, the Muppet Show, the meetings that lead nowhere, the rituals of consensus that are only ever masking inertia, the non-committal language that really is just masking a flat refusal, the long dance of misalignment dressed as collaboration. And then there are the people attracted to – and are given – leadership positions who really have the wrong attributes to lead anybody. Jon Ronson called this out at length in The Psychopath Test (I have met quite a few).

Then there are the roles people take or are placed in, the partnerships that have a brief honeymoon period and then settle quickly into a mutually toxic equilibrium: not at all explosive, just quietly corrosive. You begin with alignment on paper, only to discover that your values are operating on different clocks, or that their definition of “partnership” means your silence and their dominance.

Over the years, you begin to see the same types reappear in different clothes: the silent extractor, the overpromoted technician, the charming saboteur, the well-meaning overpromiser (that was me), the consensus-seeker who cannot make a decision. I have always found team dynamics and corporate political manoeuvring so bewildering.

People tend to fall into categories, not in terms of ‘who’ they are – personality-wise – but ‘what’ they are to you. Here is the landscape as I have come to see it.

The Colleague

The colleague is a neutral person. You work beside them. You get things done with them. Then you or they move on. Most people in your working life fall into this category and stay there. These are good, reliable people, the infrastructure of working life.

The Respected Friend

These are rare and valuable. You share more than deliverables: trust, candour and perspective. You’ve covered for each other. Maybe even taken ‘bullets’ for them. You have raised each other’s game and made each other better people. I’m very fortunate to have many of these in my life. Sometimes these relationships shift or fade. When this happens, it is noticeable, but it is not always a loss: it is just the closing of a chapter.

The Mentor

Some mentors change the course of your life. Others pass through briefly, saying something to you at just the right moment. Sometimes mentors can be your own bosses, line managers. Sometimes they can even be clients or rivals.

However, some mentors do not evolve when you do. What started as guidance becomes control. They like reminding you of the good they gave you: ‘if it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t be…’ type of ungracious comment. This is usually because you have moved beyond what they are capable of.

Mentorship is valuable, but it’s not often permanent. When it weakens, it is not failure at all. I am lucky that I have had several life-long mentors that started in a work context but expanded to life teachers.

The Rival

The rival is not a threat, but a reference point. I have lots of them. We track each other, share the same audiences, land similar clients (sometimes the same ones). We trade places on shortlists. They keep you on your feet and make you pay attention. They force you to up your game. We need rivalry. It usually sharpens into something productive. And you can meet them at conferences, shake hands, look them in the eyes and share a drink. And a laugh. When played fairly, rivalry is beautiful.

The Milkshake Drinker (aka the Mosquito)

There is a lesser form of rival that are not rivals at all, but parasites. These are people who do not compete with you. They extract. They absorb your language, mimic your frameworks, recycle your tone. Just enough to be useful. Just enough to be rewarded. Until they are found out as frauds.

Your noise, your engagement on sites like LinkedIn, are feasts to them. They mine it for gold and then pass it off as their own. I see you.

These people are not rivals or your opposite. They are your echo. There are thousands of them.

The Nemesis

This is the rarest and most revealing relationship. The nemesis is more than a rival, more than an enemy: they are your mirror. They see you for what you are. You see them in exactly the same way.

You trigger each other’s discomfort. You test each other’s resolve. You know what the other is capable of, because you live a version of it yourself. I have met very few nemeses in my career, but one was in the past year. We had a stand-off for a while and then approached each other. We talked. Then, we decided to stop opposing each other and start building together instead: courses, books, horizon scanning, big sky thinking, revolution plotting.

The tension remains. The chemistry won’t just dissolve, but it can be channelled to become something incredible. You can walk the miles together. Challenge each other from the inside. It is so difficult but so generative and existentially altering at the same time.

When the nemesis becomes a collaborator, that is a rare evolution. This is the stuff of thunder. And lightning.

The Quiet Realisation

My last article was called Maggie’s Farm and was based on the Bob Dylan song, which became a life attitude for me, whereby I would not allow myself to work for organisations where I felt disrespected or exploited. As I matured, I gradually realised that this was a stupid stance to adopt and, besides, I had wound myself up too tightly: everywhere eventually became a version of Maggie’s Farm.

And it is the same with these categories. People are not static. They shift. Their roles change. Sometimes dynamics invert themselves. The mentee might become the client. You and a rival might become colleagues. The people you had a showdown with at Maggie’s Farm #4 (or was it #7?) are now directors with a new client of yours.

Development is when you stop anchoring people to past experiences and you allow for redefinition and growth, in people you might have once underestimated or you walked away from. I wrote in my last article about the chrysalis. Everybody has many metamorphoses in their professional and personal lives. Change is not just the preserve of Mark Gibson.

Everybody you meet in your professional life are in transit, just like you and me. They are not AI agents with fixed characters and assigned values. Most people are just doing their best to adapt, survive or influence the system that they happen to find themselves in. Some are doing well. Some are not. But nobody is stationary.

Hell is not really other people, in the misread sense. An individual is always becoming, from who they have been and who they will be. What you see now is never more than a threshold between one existence and another.

Hell is other people when I reduce them to who they were to me, instead of asking who I was to them. To others I might have been the rival, the mosquito, the mentor, the nemesis. Maybe, to them, I was also running a Maggie’s Farm. Maybe I was their hell. I suppose the real growth is in seeing that none of us are fixed: not them and certainly not me.

Thank you for reading,

Mark Gibson

Leeds, United Kingdom, June 2025