I have noticed a curious thing about driving. I notice that driving emotionally detaches me from my neighborhood and other places around which I live. If I get around by car, I notice that my sense of real distances between places that I go to and my intimate connection to my environment (city, neighborhoods) are disrupted. I realized this as soon as I moved into a downtown area and began experiencing my neighborhood in a way that is natural to a human–by walking.
For an average person living in America, the mental model of their environment consists of disconnected islands (“destinations”) to which they go in their car, and then there are the long, dull and repetitive stretches of driving. Since the islands are so disconnected (“suburban home”, “work”, “grocery store”, etc.), people must map their environment in a way that is very unnatural for them. I think that this is causing some obvious problems.
People who drive cars too much and don’t think about it tend to miss out on many details of the world that they live in. They have no way of letting the sounds and sights of the city soak into them. Everything is whizzing by way too fast, and they have no time to pay attention to it anyway. They do not actually feel the ground of their streets underneath them, be it moist, dry, rough or smooth. To them, the city has no seasons (in the car, it’s always or almost always 75 degrees Farhenheit and it never rains in there!). They have no way of noticing that trees are budding on their way to work one day. They can’t smell the lilac tree that grows on their street (instead, they are smelling the chemicals in their $2.99 air freshener). What does this all lead to?
I think that it leads to the dulling of the senses. If a person seldom has the opportunity to experience the world in its raw (and not through a thick layer of glass), their ability to notice the natural things in the world tends to atrophy. This is what I notice. I notice it in myself and others.
I think that as far as their influence on human psychology, cars are probably about as bad as TV. To me, driving a car is kind of like “watching an interactive movie about me going somewhere.” In a car, there is no real sense of me “going to work” or “going to class” or “going to get food.” I simply play a little computer game in which i press pedals, roll a wheel, stare at the gray boring road ahead of me, try not to hit any of the shiny little objects around me, and then suddenly I am there! All that delicate human experience of slowly approaching a place, thinking about it, anticipating it, noticing the nature around it is gone! Gone in the name of speed, efficiency and short-term convenience.
After a while, the whole life starts seeming a little bit too much like a movie. Static regulated temperature, no smells, everything is ultra-safe and free of hazards and free of mysteries. People lose their ability to deal with such things and when they suddenly experience them all in a rush (they go camping or they have to walk a mile in the rain for some reason), they are overwhelmed and feel out of place. Yet all those things are an essential part of human experience! We cannot afford to lose our ability to deal with them. Not that we won’t survive without them, or anything. We’ll probably survive just fine. But our lives will not be human! I think that there is great joy in living a naturally human life (sometimes, at least!). Let’s not lose our chance to live a human life! Walking is good not just for physical reasons. It’s good for psychological reasons too, I think.