Yeah exactly. Taking mass transit like trains and planes is mindless and communal and you can pay attention to or ignore what you’re passing. Driving leaves you having to pay a little attention to it, but only a little and you’re in control but not like “I can stop and enjoy the sights or easily duck out for a breather level of in control. And yeah that really gets to the point of it, cars are extremely anti social. You’re left outside the experience of community with them.
And you’re exactly right. It’s low level stress. To do anything or go anywhere and it has a ton of perks but they’re all relative to how many people drive. If society is built around an assumption of cars, bus service is at best decent but inconvenient and restrictive with no sympathy to transit related issues. If you’re one of the few drivers it’s just way faster because the roads let you do it. But for every perk there’s cost and it compounds across all of us until our cities are filled with parking lots and we don’t know our neighbors’ faces
To respond to you and the sibling comment about actually enjoying cars … the low level stress also includes the possibility of becoming high level stress.
Experience driving was brought up, and so it’s worth asking who here has experienced or seen what bad accidents look like. I’ve seen a fair few, some horrific, been a passenger when someone was hit (they were fine fortunately) and myself have accidentally run over my own cat (they survived but their leg was never the same … though in the moment I could only imagine the worst). It builds up over time as you realise how fundamentally dangerous these things are especially once you realise that there are naive pets and children around, or that more than many things in our lives, death is a single mistake away.
Yeah exactly. Taking mass transit like trains and planes is mindless and communal and you can pay attention to or ignore what you’re passing. Driving leaves you having to pay a little attention to it, but only a little and you’re in control but not like “I can stop and enjoy the sights or easily duck out for a breather level of in control. And yeah that really gets to the point of it, cars are extremely anti social. You’re left outside the experience of community with them.
And you’re exactly right. It’s low level stress. To do anything or go anywhere and it has a ton of perks but they’re all relative to how many people drive. If society is built around an assumption of cars, bus service is at best decent but inconvenient and restrictive with no sympathy to transit related issues. If you’re one of the few drivers it’s just way faster because the roads let you do it. But for every perk there’s cost and it compounds across all of us until our cities are filled with parking lots and we don’t know our neighbors’ faces
To respond to you and the sibling comment about actually enjoying cars … the low level stress also includes the possibility of becoming high level stress.
Experience driving was brought up, and so it’s worth asking who here has experienced or seen what bad accidents look like. I’ve seen a fair few, some horrific, been a passenger when someone was hit (they were fine fortunately) and myself have accidentally run over my own cat (they survived but their leg was never the same … though in the moment I could only imagine the worst). It builds up over time as you realise how fundamentally dangerous these things are especially once you realise that there are naive pets and children around, or that more than many things in our lives, death is a single mistake away.