I don’t know about you, but when I’m driving I sometimes feel that my personality somehow changes and I’m transforming into the worst version of myself.
A while back, when I noticed that, I tried to notice how other drivers behave. It turns out that most of them spit poison everywhere at the smallest mistake other drivers do. It’s like when we’re driving we forget the other cars are driven by people; people that are not perfect because we all are people. However, somehow, we think we are perfect drivers and every driver that makes a mistake is a piece of sh*t and he/she should die (I’m not even going to start with gender stereotypes).
So I started to wonder: why driving has this effect? Why do we swear and spit and react in a negative way if something as small as a fly cuts off our way when it’s green and we have priority? Why driving brings out the worst of us?
Let’s start with the environment: the magnificent car. I believe the car acts like a shell, a secure place where we can feel free, especially if we’re alone in the car. When we’re alone and we’re secure, our subconscious becomes powerful, mainly because the barriers set by our conscious (and/or society) don’t matter (and that’s because the lack of them impacts nobody). This brings me to the conclusion that driving alone becomes the perfect environment for making us feel free.
If we feel free, it doesn’t matter the importance of what happens around us. When we’re free, every little thing happening around us acts as a trigger for what we want to express, but we are stopped by the conscious/society barriers. So, if the barriers are gone thanks to the perfect environment, there is nothing in place to stop us to release our deepest frustrations.
If you’re wondering why the worst of us comes to the surface instead of the best of us, it’s because the best of us is not restricted by our conscious/society. We can always behave at our best without restrictions, whilst our worst has many restrictions in place, restrictions that seen to disappear when we’re driving (at least, that’s how our subconscious perceives it).
It seems that driving makes it easy to behave at our worst because we have no other environments to do so. If we’re alone in a room, there are no triggers, therefore our worst has no reason to come to the surface.
What do you think? Why driving brings out the worst of us?
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