Allow me to propose a scenario so that this rant might be better understood. You’re driving carelessly on any road that has two or more lanes on your respective side. Your favorite jam comes on the radio and you instinctively say, “Oh shit, that’s my shit.” It’s in this moment that you feel as if your life couldn’t possibly be any better. Suddenly, you encounter a car ahead of you that’s traveling noticeably slower.
No big deal.
You turn your signal on and check your blind spot only to see that a car occupies the space next to you. You are now stuck behind the slower car with no choice but to tap your break, clinch your steering wheel with the force of something not of this world, and feel the explosion take place in your head. It’s in this moment that you revoke the thought of the previous moment and now think of yourself as an incredible moron for ever being so naïve.
You now want to shoot the drivers in front of and beside you, not to mention yourself. The car in the other lane steadily creeps ahead of the slower car in front of you and you now have room to make your lane change.
I now get to my point.
It’s not enough to simply move into your new lane and go about your business. It now becomes completely necessary to obnoxiously and excessively accelerate into the lane and continue to trek at a break-neck pace until you no longer see the slower car in your rearview mirror, in the hopes that their absence from your vision means their presence in some situation that greatly surpasses the turmoil that you just endured.
I’ve been mulling over this since being involved in it earlier today. From what I can tell, this reaction is a universal response to the given situation, so my thoughts today have been to wonder why that is. The only logical solution I can come up with is that, like our fear of snakes and spiders, this is an evolutionary thing that’s been handed down for thousands of years and lives inside of us from the day we’re born.
Think about it: Caveman Oglethorpe is tracking down his dinner for the night and all of a sudden is slowed by the old and senile caveman Bartleby, who would’ve been left for dead years ago, but found a way to start fires with his penis. Oglethorpe tries to move past Bartleby, but finds that fat caveman Jones has moved next to him. Jones is moving faster than Bartleby, but is also attacking a rhinoceros and rye sandwich, so it’s not immediately possible for Oglethorpe to get past the two. He becomes enraged and clubs them both in the head and eats them for dinner instead of his previous prey. We, through thousands of years of evolution, have created laws against killing and/or eating other humans, so we simply rev our engines to suggest our desire to do so.
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