Why Are We Like This

A Question That Already Knows Its Answer

Some song titles pose a genuine question. Others are just a sigh dressed up as one, the kind of thing you mutter after doing something you already knew was a bad idea. “Why Are We Like This” belongs to the second category. Across two and a half minutes, sombr doesn't investigate why people hurt each other so much as sit inside the discomfort of already knowing, and doing it anyway.

It's a small song on a small record, but its bluntness is the point. Rather than dressing up heartbreak in metaphor until it's unrecognizable, sombr names the exact feeling most people try to talk themselves out of admitting: wanting someone you know is bad for you, and choosing them anyway.

A Teenager's First Real Studio Record

sombr, born Shane Michael Boose on New York City's Lower East Side, was still a teenager when he wrote the material that became In Another Life. He'd been majoring in vocal music at LaGuardia High School when his 2022 single “Caroline” spread across TikTok and pulled him toward a deal with Warner Records^[1]. “Why Are We Like This” landed on September 15, 2023, as the fifth of eight tracks on that debut EP, sombr's first collection built with a professional producer rather than assembled alone on GarageBand and Logic Pro in his bedroom^[2].

The EP as a whole has been described as a study in the aftermath of relationships rather than their dramatic collapse, songs that circle the disorientation of trying to make sense of someone after the fact. “Why Are We Like This” compresses that same inquiry into its most direct form, functioning almost like a thesis statement buried in the middle of the tracklist^[2].

That distinction matters for how the song plays. This wasn't a viral single engineered for a specific moment. It was part of a coherent, quieter body of work, recorded with producer Tony Berg after years of sombr writing and producing everything himself. The polish is real, but it's restrained polish, the kind that supports a confession rather than dressing it up as a spectacle.

sombr has been candid about how he writes: alone, usually starting at a piano or with a guitar, and rarely about one single person. He's described blending details from different relationships, films, and books into lines that read as specific even when they're composites, saying his goal is for the finished song to give listeners something to hold onto in their own lives rather than a strict autobiography of his^[4]. That habit matters here, because it means the song's narrator shouldn't be read as a literal transcript of one relationship so much as a distilled version of a feeling sombr recognized from several.

Wanting Something You Already Know Is Wrong

The song's emotional engine is moral discomfort that doesn't stop anyone from acting. The narrator describes the relationship in explicitly ambiguous, not-quite-black-or-white terms, aware that what's happening is wrong by any reasonable standard and choosing to stay inside it anyway because it still feels good in the moment^[3].

That's a harder thing to write convincingly than a straightforward heartbreak song. Most breakup writing casts the narrator as the wronged party, someone owed sympathy. This song refuses that comfort. It's a confession of complicity, an admission that the narrator's own judgment was overridden by desire, and that awareness of the wrongness didn't function as a deterrent so much as background noise.

There's a kind of relief in hearing that admitted so plainly. Plenty of songs romanticize bad decisions or dress them up as fate. This one doesn't bother with either move. It treats the wrongness as a settled fact and spends its runtime on the more interesting question underneath: not whether the narrator should feel guilty, but why guilt alone was never going to be enough to change anything.

A House Full of Prayers and Silence

One of the song's more striking details is its domestic, quasi-religious imagery: a household where prayer is spoken in one room while a very different kind of truth is being lived out in another. That juxtaposition of piety and transgression under the same roof gives the song a sense of stakes beyond ordinary secrecy. It's not just that this relationship is complicated. It's that it exists somewhere it isn't supposed to, inside a space with its own rules about what's permitted and what isn't^[3].

Attempts to talk through the situation don't land, either. The song describes words bouncing back unresolved rather than landing where they're aimed, a small image that captures how communication breaks down once two people are no longer being honest about what they actually want^[3]. The result is a relationship running on unspoken tension rather than any shared understanding, which is part of why the title's question never resolves into an answer. There isn't one available inside the world the song describes.

Loving Someone Who's Already Somewhere Else

Underneath the guilt is a more familiar kind of hurt: loving someone more than they love you back. The narrator describes being fully absorbed in the relationship, in over their head emotionally, while the other person's attention was already drifting toward other priorities entirely^[3]. That asymmetry is what turns the song from a simple tale of wrongdoing into something sadder and more universal. The narrator isn't just grappling with the ethics of the situation. They're grappling with loving someone who was never going to match that level of investment in return.

It's a common enough experience that it barely needs a specific backstory to land: caring more than you're cared for, and staying anyway because the alternative, walking away from someone who still has a hold on you, feels harder than staying inside the discomfort.

A Short Song for a Long-Running Feeling

At two minutes and thirty-four seconds, “Why Are We Like This” is the shortest track on In Another Life, and its brevity fits the EP's overall restraint, an eight-song project that favors understatement over dramatic swings^[5]. There's no bridge that resolves the tension, no key change that signals catharsis. The song simply states its discomfort and ends, which mirrors the way the feeling it describes doesn't actually get resolved in real life either.

The title phrase itself carries a second layer of resonance for the audience sombr was writing toward. “Why are we like this” had already become a familiar bit of internet shorthand by the early 2020s, a self-deprecating, half-joking way of narrating your own bad decisions online. Borrowing that phrase as a song title connects the track to the exact kind of confessional, extremely online candor that had already made “Caroline” a TikTok hit, and it's part of a broader pattern in sombr's catalog: turning a plainspoken, almost conversational phrase into the emotional crux of a song. That same instinct for direct, internet-legible songwriting is part of what carried him from this EP into the much larger commercial breakthrough of “Back to Friends” and “Undressed” less than two years later^[1].

Villain, Victim, or Just Human?

The song leaves real room for more than one reading. Because the narrator never clarifies who initiated the wrongdoing, it's possible to hear this as the confession of the person doing the betraying, someone justifying their own bad behavior in real time. It's equally possible to hear it as the voice of the person being strung along, aware their partner has already emotionally checked out and staying anyway out of attachment rather than self-respect. The song doesn't resolve that ambiguity, and it's more effective for not trying to.

The prayer imagery opens another possible reading, too: a relationship that has to stay hidden not just because it's inconvenient, but because it would be genuinely unwelcome within a family or belief system built around a very different set of values. Read that way, the song's guilt isn't only about infidelity in the conventional sense. It's about wanting something that the world you were raised in has already told you is unacceptable.

Given how openly sombr has talked about combining details from multiple relationships and outside stories into a single composite narrator^[4], it's worth resisting the urge to pin the song to one literal event in his own life. The specificity that makes it feel diaristic is craft, not necessarily confession, and that's precisely what allows so many different listeners to recognize themselves in it.

Why It Still Lands

“Why Are We Like This” isn't the song that made sombr famous. That would come later, with songs built for stadiums and playlists rather than bedroom confessionals. But it's a clear early marker of the songwriting instinct that eventually did make him famous: an unwillingness to flatter the narrator, a comfort with moral messiness, and a refusal to wrap up a complicated feeling with a tidy ending just because the song has to end somewhere.

The title's question isn't really asking for an explanation. It's naming the gap between what we know and what we do anyway, and trusting that most listeners will recognize that gap without needing it explained any further.