Paradox: Why Good People Become Bad Behind the Wheel
There’s a feeling that recently the car has changed not only on the outside. The people behind the wheel have changed too. No, this isn’t about how “drivers used to be more courteous.” Every generation loves to tell stories about how everyone once yielded the right of way, thanked each other with hazard lights, and smiled at one another at intersections. Most likely, this is just as much a myth as the stories about how cars used to be more reliable and the grass used to be greener.
But something has genuinely happened. The modern motorist has become much angrier. And no, it’s not that people suddenly went bad en masse, as the nervous Moscow taxi driver from the film “Brother 2” claimed. It’s simply that the personal car has ceased to be a source of pleasure and is increasingly becoming a cause of constant stress. Once, the car was associated with freedom. Get behind the wheel – and off you go wherever you want. Bliss!
Today it resembles a computer game on the highest difficulty level, where the developers release an update every week that makes the player’s life even harder. In the morning, you need to choose a route to avoid traffic jams. Then find parking, remember to pay for it through an app that constantly glitches, while the mobile internet keeps dropping out entirely. Then navigate around road repairs, avoid a new speed camera you didn’t even know about, and in the evening discover that your parking neighbor opened their door right into your fender and, of course, drove off.
In short, an ordinary day. The car has quietly transformed from a symbol of freedom into an endless list of minor irritants. It’s like buying a yacht and then finding out that 99% of the time you’re not sailing, but filling out paperwork and paying marina bills. Add prices to that. Every trip now comes with an internal accountant: “How much does gas cost today?”; “How much will insurance go up?”; “What if something breaks?”; “I wonder how much maintenance costs now?”. The car used to ask for attention; now it regularly asks for money.
It’s no wonder that even a minor annoyance starts to feel like a personal insult. Someone cut you off? Irritation. Didn’t yield? Anger. A queue at the gas station? Infuriating. Someone slow to move on green? Rage. All of this is trivial in itself. The problem is that the modern driver gets behind the wheel with an almost full patience meter. Any little thing becomes that final straw. But there’s another reason that’s rarely talked about.
The car no longer makes a person special. Just twenty years ago, a new car was an event. Today, the car is increasingly seen as a household appliance. Like a smartphone that hasn’t gotten boring yet but has already stopped delighting. And when a thing stops bringing joy, it starts to be judged solely by the number of problems it creates. And this applies not only to owners – look at how people’s attitudes toward each other have changed.
Previously, a driver saw another driver ahead of them. Today, they see an obstacle. The one who took the last parking spot. The one driving 5 km/h slower. The one taking too long to turn. The one who cut right in front of your nose. We increasingly rarely think that behind the wheel sits a person just like us, who is also tired after work, running late to pick up their child from kindergarten, or simply lost in thought.
No. Now what’s in front of us is not a person, but… an obstruction. But perhaps the most interesting cause of anger has nothing to do with cars at all. We’ve stopped being alone. The modern driver doesn’t rest even behind the wheel. The navigation system reports a traffic jam. The phone vibrates. The infotainment system offers an update. Assistants beep. Cameras warn. The car talks to you more often than some relatives! It’s a strange paradox: we bought a car for freedom, and in the end we got another gadget that demands attention every few seconds.
And then there are social media. Any road conflict can now end up online within five minutes. Any mistake of yours can become a meme. Any awkward lane change is a reason for hundreds of vicious comments in news communities. We’ve started driving as if someone is constantly judging us. And perhaps that’s what has changed the atmosphere on the roads more than anything else. But there’s one detail that won’t let go. Despite all this, millions of people still love to drive.
They deliberately head out early in the morning while the roads are empty. They take road trips by car, even though flying is faster. They buy convertibles, sports cars, old Zhigulis, gas-guzzling SUVs, exotic coupes – cars whose purchase cannot be rationally explained. So maybe it’s not about the cars after all. Perhaps the problem is that modern life makes us more irritable, and the car just happens to be the place where that irritation finally gets a chance to break out?
Or is it all much simpler? Maybe it’s not that motorists have become angrier, but that people behind the wheel have simply stopped pretending?
