The Worst Thing about Cars is that Nobody is Even Happy

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Driving in a car offers a wild privilege. Take, for example, the experience of your body. Sitting in the seat of a car is super comfortable, basically a Lay-Z-Boy slash couch with adjustable and often heated seats that have a complex system of electric motors in them to allow them to move in five different directions until you achieve perfect lumbar support, whatever that is. These seats are often made of thick upholstery, sometimes even from cowhide, and teams of engineers have spent lifetimes calculating how to make these seats slightly more comfortable. For the vast majority of people, it's the nicest chair they’ll ever sit in.

Think also for a moment about the air inside the car. It's basically a soundproof, climate-controlled wonder chamber. You can be in one of these machines in a downpour or in a blizzard, on a Wyoming plateau at twenty below zero or at 100 humid degrees in a Mississippi swamp, and you will barely notice a difference. Frankly, that’s amazing.

And most every car has a fancy stereo system with speakers that surround your head perfectly, and you can turn up the tunes as loud as you want. Here, too, teams of engineers have spent decades applying their sharp minds to the critical problem of slightly improving the audio quality of the inside of this steel box. These days much of the time, you can even talk to the machine, simply telling it to do things like “change the radio station to 96.5” and it will do that without you even having to lift a finger.

And, by the way, the entire machine moves at quite a high rate of speed! The dials on the dashboards often go up to 150 miles per hour or higher. The national treasury and many of the public functions of our government (like police) are dominated by budgets devoted to making it easier for you to move these machines around with ease. Tens of thousands of people labor for lifetimes working out how to remove obstacles, smooth bumps, and make your journey -- cushioned of course by a sophisticated suspension system -- slightly more comfortable. They use detailed equations to calculate the exact right kind of cement that might remove small vibrations during your trip. Diagrams with carefully calculated angles are created with the goal of distributing more easily the excess water that might fall before you on the road. Teams of people wake in the middle of the night to clear paths for you each time it snows. All told, over the generations, trillions of public dollars have been spent to literally move mountains to create wide smooth paths for your luxurious machine. Thousands of buildings in cities everywhere have been torn down. Entire forests full of trees have been cut down because they were in the way. All of this was done to make sure that, when you drive one of these miracle boxes, your path will be slightly straighter, your journey slightly faster, and your driving surface so forgiving that your attention can slightly diminish as you travel around the city in your luxury stereo climate couch.

And also, millions of signs, lights, poles, written messages, and reflective warnings have been erected all through the city and countryside just to decrease the chances that you might kill yourself in one these speedy fancyboxes. Generations of engineers have devoted their lives, formed entire institutions at major universities, trained tens of thousands of young people, all to make it slightly easier for you to distract yourself as you travel, perhaps to eat a burrito with one hand, perhaps to answer your hand-held phone, perhaps to drive after a few beers without killing yourself or anyone else. (Though this still happens every day, of course.) Governments have spent millions to mount billboards and hire creative people to create radio advertisements that remind you to do basic tasks, including things so simple as for example strapping a small belt around your waist because, for some reason, some people still refuse to perform this life-saving act.

Pause and think about how entire cities have been rearranged and rebuilt to make moving around in these machines slightly more convenient. These new cities are even sprinkled liberally with buildings designed so that you don't even have to get out of your comfortable climate-controlled mobile couch machine to go to a restaurant or a pharmacy. Instead, architects have worked out ways to make it easy for you to you simply pull up along a wall of concrete bricks, mumble a few words into a microphone, and, within minutes, someone will lean slightly out of a window in the side of the building and hand you a hot coffee or a hamburger or a bucket of fried chicken or the world’s finest pharmaceutical drugs in child-proof caps, all of this without having to remove yourself from your luxurious machine and walk a single step.

And it's cheap, too, if you think about it even for a second. A gallon of gasoline costs less than a cup of coffee, and only one of those liquids will transport your 3,000 pound miracle couch for thirty miles - a distance of 156,000 feet -- with only the slight movement of your right foot.

In fact, many of the costs of this amazing machine have been taken care of in advance. You need not pay the full expense of all the roads, steel beams, bridges, metal guard rails, aluminum poles, and hard surfaces made from petroleum asphalt and concrete. Nor need you concern yourself about the effects of the nitrogen monoxide or carbon monoxide that pour ceaselessly out from your machine's combustion engine, polluting the air for the people who might be near to your travels, and probably giving breathing children asthma. Nor do you have to think even for a moment about the carbon dioxide that transforms the atmosphere above, changing the climate of the entire planet in ways that are surely irreversible and devastating.

If somehow gasoline gets too expensive, you shouldn’t worry about that either. Chances are that the government will spend trillions to invade a oil-producing nation, killing countless people in the process, in order to ensure that the price goes down.

Speaking of killing, most of the time, even if you run someone over, even if you end another person's life accidentally with your large powerful expensive machine, as long as you weren't drunk, it’s fine. You might feel bad about it, but that's about the extent of what will likely happen to you.

And remember that, pretty much everywhere you go, businesses, homeowners, and governments have paved the earth with asphalt to make it easier to put your machine somewhere when you're not even using it. That's the case nearly everywhere, and most of the time it's completely free for you. Right now in this very country there are millions upon millions of 6’ x 8’ spaces waiting for your  privately owned movement machine to sit whenever you’re not using it. All these things have been done to make it slightly easier and simpler for you to sit in your comfortable personal climate-controlled stereo sound motion-couch and speed physically effortlessly around the city.

But here’s the thing that confuses me. If you stop and ask anyone what they think or how they are doing or how they feel about driving, what do people usually say?

Almost every time, they complain.

Almost every time, after an entire nation has been pretty much devoted to a single-minded purpose of improving the experience of driving a car, nobody's even happy about it.

Every day, almost unceasingly, people operating these miraculous devices bitch and moan. People complain that they cannot travel even faster. They complain that the gasoline -- a liquid whose pollution by the way is causing the extinction of a million species of unique and fascinating plants and animals as you read this --  is not even cheaper. They complain that they cannot place their large expensive device directly next to their destinations, causing them to walk two hundred or three hundred feet using their own two legs. They complain if they have to slow down slightly due to other people driving their luxurious machines, or if they have to stop for an old lady to cross the street. By far the number one reaction people have when you stop and ask them about these amazing technological marvels, the convenience of which more public money and attention has been spent than any another collective social activity with the exception of warfare, is to express displeasure.

When it comes to incredible luxury of driving in an automobile, nobody is even happy about it.

What if people driving down the street were content simply to exist in an insanely comfortable couch device with the best stereo they'll ever own where they can adjust the temperature to specific degrees and aim the flow of the air at their faces in a dozen different ways? What if people were pleased to be able to travel effortlessly around the city, moving barely a muscle, just by flipping their wrists and twitching their toes? What if people were happy about being in these miracle comfort coffins around which the world has been remade, and did not insist on getting incessantly angry, honking the horn at the slightest inconvenience, or speeding around each other in ways that have killed tens of thousands of Americans each year like clockwork for the past half century?

What if driving made people happy and not miserable?