I don't even understand why people call it a paradox. A paradox has no obvious solution. This one has many obvious solutions, the most obvious one that the premise is faulty: perhaps life is not common at all.

There is another premise that is faulty: that the answer to "where's everybody" is that "since we see nobody, there is nobody". But for all we know the planets around Alpha Centauri may be teaming with life, and there would be no way for us to detect that. If only 1% of the solar systems in our galaxy host intelligent life, then the number of intelligent life forms would be truly mind-boggling, yet we wouldn't be able to detect a whisper of their presence. For the simple reason that space is also mind-blowingly vast, and all signals decay with the square root of the distance.

That's part of the Great Filter answer to the Fermi paradox. Though, I agree, it's not really a paradox. If the great filter is true, the first filter is life forming at all. We hope that the filter is behind us and that's why intelligent life in the universe seems rare, rather than ahead of us. If life is common, but intelligent life is uncommon, that's concerning because it makes it more likely that the filter is ahead of us. Meaning, something like, once an organism has control over the whole planet there's something that prevents them from going to multiple planets.