Every so often you come across something that sharpens a thought you’ve had for years. That happened to me recently, not through a grand study or spiritual quest, but by looking into one very specific Buddhist idea: the emphasis on intention over action. I wasn’t hunting for enlightenment. I was simply curious about how a tradition describes the mechanics behind why people behave the way they do.
What I found wasn’t mystical or esoteric. It was a very practical model that, strangely enough, reinforced something I’ve believed for a long time: the world doesn’t divide neatly into good people and bad people. Instead, most people sit in a third category, one that rarely gets discussed. Not harmful, but not exactly helpful. Not villains, not heroes — just people quietly moving through life without leaving much of a moral footprint either way.
This middle zone is where the vast majority of human behaviour actually happens, but we almost never talk about it. We prefer dramatic contrasts: the selfless helper or the destructive force. Yet if you observe real behaviour rather than the cultural stories we tell ourselves, you see something far more understated. Most people aren’t deliberately hurting anyone. They’re also not going out of their way to make anything significantly better. They’re simply living, dealing with their own concerns, and staying within their lane.
What caught my attention in the Buddhist model I was reading is that it unintentionally maps onto this three-tier system. Buddhism goes on at length about intentions — the idea that what really shapes you is the mental impulse behind your actions. Behaviour is described almost as the surface ripple of whatever intention sat behind it. That’s an interesting position, because it means the tradition places far more weight on not intending harm than on actively doing good.
Once you see that, something becomes very clear. A person could follow its ethical guidance with absolute consistency — avoid lying, avoid harming, avoid taking things that aren’t theirs, avoid treating people badly — and end up causing no trouble at all. They would never hurt anyone, never create chaos, never step into the territory we’d call “bad.” But they might also never step into the territory we’d call “good” in any active sense. They could live their whole life without ever having helped someone in a meaningful way, without ever having taken a risk for someone else, without ever choosing courage over comfort.
In other words, they would fit perfectly into that third category: not bad, not good, just neutral.
And the more I sat with that, the more it matched what we see in everyday life. The people who cause real damage are a minority. The people who create substantial good are a minority. The huge population in between is made up of ordinary people doing ordinary things — working, raising families, staying out of trouble, minding their own business. They aren’t out there harming anyone. But they’re also not building schools, defending strangers, or reshaping society. They live quietly, decently, predictably.
What’s interesting is that this middle category isn’t passive because of lack of empathy or intelligence. It’s passive because of the way life is structured. Doing harm is easy — a moment of anger, carelessness, or selfishness is often all it takes. Doing genuine good is much harder. It asks for action, time, commitment, and often discomfort. It asks for doing something that isn’t required of you. Most people don’t have the time or energy, or they simply prioritise their immediate world: their family, their job, their responsibilities. It’s not a moral failure; it’s a kind of gravitational pull of ordinary life.
The Buddhist focus on intention brings an additional layer to this. If you believe intention is what matters most, then a person who has kind intentions but never does anything with them is still, in a sense, ethically sound. They’re not intending harm. They’re not generating hostility. Their internal world is well-tuned. But in practical terms, that inner kindness leaves no external trace. No one’s life improves. Nothing changes. It’s a goodness that never becomes behaviour.
That’s where the tension sits for me. You can have a perfectly calm, well-intentioned mind and still produce almost nothing of value for anyone else. The interior world is tidy; the exterior world remains untouched by it. And this mirrors what so many people experience in their own lives. They think well of others but never say the encouraging thing. They feel empathy but don’t intervene. They imagine helping but don’t follow through. It’s not malice. It’s inertia.
So this third category — the one neither philosophy nor religion tends to highlight — ends up being the most populated: people who avoid harm, but who also avoid action. People whose morality exists mainly at the level of intention, not behaviour.
If you take a step back and apply this lens to the world, it explains a lot. It explains why societies don’t collapse even though a small percentage of people behave terribly. It explains why extraordinary good is rare and why it usually comes from people with an unusual drive, or courage, or personal history that pushes them into action when others would step back. And it explains why so many discussions about morality feel detached from reality: they assume people fall into two camps when, in truth, most fall into neither.
What I found unexpectedly useful in that single Buddhist idea was not the religion behind it but the psychological architecture it pointed towards. It treats the absence of harm as an achievement in its own right. But that leaves a gap — the gap between being harmless and being good. The gap between kindness as a thought and kindness as an act. The gap between a gentle inner world and a meaningful outer one.
The more I reflected on this, the more it sharpened my own view: the dividing line between good and bad isn’t intention. It’s action. What you actually do is the only part the world ever experiences. Thoughts come and go. Feelings shift. Intentions rise and fall with mood and circumstance. But behaviour — the choices you make when someone needs help, the decisions you take in difficult moments, the times you step forward when you could easily stay out of it — that’s the part of you that exists beyond your own mind.
That’s why the three-tier model feels so accurate. Bad people don’t just intend harm; they act on it. Good people don’t just intend good; they act on it. And most people intend well but never convert it into behaviour. They live in that quiet middle — ethical enough not to cause damage, passive enough not to create benefit.
I didn’t expect a quick piece of Buddhist psychology to support that view so neatly. But it did. Not because I’ve suddenly become a believer in the tradition, but because the structure of the idea exposes the difference between inner life and outward behaviour. And once you see that difference clearly, you see the whole human population differently too. You see the bad. You see the good. And between them, you see the vast landscape of the neutral: people who mean well, people who don’t wish harm, people who never quite translate intention into action.
The real question, then, is simple: which category do we want to live in? And perhaps more importantly, what would it take to step out of the middle?