I’m not talking about the fairies from children's stories. I'm talking about the creepy, alien creatures that haunted European folktales, not the cute, shiny ones with glittering wings.
They don't think or feel the way humans do. And that can be a huge problem, especially for us.
In many stories, interacting with them meant facing a mind with no empathy, no recognizable morals, and no familiar emotions. It would be more like interacting with a predator than a whimsical sprite. Or perhaps a psychopath.
Fae longevity
“Life’s impermanence, I realized, is what makes every single day so precious. It’s what shapes our time here. It’s what makes it so important that not a single moment be wasted.”
Eternity can be a long time. And tedious. In most tales, fairies cannot die of natural causes. Their lives stretch on endlessly, repeating the same patterns.
Humans, by contrast, are fragile. We die for countless reasons: infections, accidents, genetics, or even a burst blood vessel. Even if we evade all that, time itself still wins.
In our brevity, we rush to make something of life. We create music, build machines, explore the oceans and galaxies, fall in love, and tell stories. We burn brightly because we know we won't last forever.
Fairies, however, have no such urgency. Eternity gives them infinite time to do whatever they want but also strips away the reason to do it now. There is always tomorrow, or a century from now. That is the perfect recipe for stagnation.
And stagnation is boring.
Fae envy of humanity
Some tales depict fairies as cruel or mischievous beings who envy humans. They envy our emotions, creativity, and capacity to find meaning in transient lives. This envy is not always expressed openly. Sometimes it takes the form of strange bargains where humans are lured into the fairy realm and held captive like rare pets. At other times, it manifests as spiteful acts, such as sabotaging human endeavors or twisting a blessing into a curse.
This envy is not what we understand it to be. A human envies because they want to possess what another has, or at least experience it. Fairies envy in a colder way, as though observing a fascinating yet unattainable phenomenon. They know they lack something essential, yet instead of longing for it, they prod, test, and dismantle it like a scientist who is curious about fire but unable to feel its warmth.
Humans carry within them the sharp awareness of impermanence. We love fiercely because we know love can be lost. We create art not only to express ourselves but also to leave behind something that will outlive us. This urgency, born of mortality, lends significance to even the smallest gestures. To a fairy, this must seem like a strange fever that consumes our kind. But it is also what makes us vibrant.
Fairies, in contrast, are unhurried. They can sing for centuries or dance for decades, but their songs have no end, and their dances have no climax. Life stretches on, flat and endless.
Humans interrupt that monotony.
This explains why so many stories tell of fairies stealing human children or attempting to seduce mortals into their courts.
A different kind of moral
Their way of thinking is distant from ours yet strangely familiar. It unsettles us because it mirrors parts of ourselves, our coldness, selfishness, and curiosity, but stretched into something alien.
In folklore, fairies do not kill out of cruelty nor save out of compassion. Their actions follow a logic that has little to do with human morality. They might reward a traveler who stumbles into their circle simply because he pleased them with a song or curse another because he picked the wrong flower.
There is no moral consistency as we understand it and no guiding principle that applies to all situations.
For humans, morality is often tied to survival. Communities need trust, fairness, and empathy to function. Without these qualities, societies collapse. Our moral systems are an adaptation to our fragile existence. Fairies do not share this fragility and, therefore, their "morality," if the word even applies, developed along a very different path.
Imagine a being for whom time has no consequence. Imagine a society where no one dies, where mistakes do not lead to irreversible tragedies, and where loss is almost meaningless because centuries erase the pain. In such a world, morality would not be built around care or urgency but around amusement, curiosity, and the strange rules of power. What matters is not kindness or cruelty, but whether something relieves boredom or breaks patterns.
So, do they have morals? Not in the human sense. Their actions aren't guided by empathy, compassion, or malice alone.
Their morality is simply different.
Are they psychopaths?
While it would be tempting to call them psychopaths, that would be a mistake. Psychopathy is a human construct designed for human minds. Fairies are not human. They do not fit neatly into our psychological labels.
However, their behavior often resembles that of a psychopath: they are detached, manipulative, and indifferent to suffering. Like psychopaths, fairies can charm, deceive, and entrap. They play with emotions without feeling them, mimic kindness without believing in it, and punish transgressions without empathy for the pain they cause.
However, the resemblance only goes so far. Psychopaths are broken humans shaped by trauma, genetics, or a lack of brain wiring that enables empathy, among other things.
Fairies are not broken. They are complete in their own way and function exactly as they were shaped by eternity. Their detachment is not a flaw, but rather a feature of their existence.
Calling them psychopaths might comfort us because it places them within a familiar framework. It reduces the alien to the familiar. But doing so blinds us to their deeper strangeness.
Perhaps this is what makes old fairy tales so haunting. They present us with creatures that act like us but think differently, creatures that reflect what humanity might look like if stripped of mortality and urgency.
They are not evil in the way we define it. They are not good in the way we define good either. They are something else, something unsettling precisely because we cannot classify them.
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