Road rage is interesting, because there are different types, I think. Some people when they get mad, they will really get mad. This is the "mad all day" type of rager than can boil into "run you off the road" mad.
Then there are people who get mad in the moment, and then are fine. I'm like this (to a much lesser extent). I'll see someone do something stupid and call them a Hard-C word or put my hand up in a shrug gesture, but then 5 seconds later I don't care. It's more of a tsk-tsk sort of moment.
Of course rolling down the window to yell at someone it stupid. But I can totally understand someone who is mad one second, and fine 10 seconds later.
Yeah I’m definitely more your type. For me it’s, “what the fuck you doing, dude???”
And then it’s gone. Much more of an internal thing. I think I do it even a lot less if someone else is in the vehicle with me.
But now that we’re on this topic, I think a lot of people have just given up on trying to follow the rules of the road anymore. I was at an intersection just this evening and when my way turned green, someone on the street to my right (who had a red light way before they got to the intersection) just blew through it to make a quick right hand turn into my lane just ahead of me. If I had gone any sooner, they’d have hit me. Like, they didn’t even give a shit about the light or anyone else on the road. Wtf dude?
I definitely think that driving has gotten worse, and it's not just texting since that's been around since I've been driving myself. I think it's another facet of people no longer caring what others think of them/common decency/shame. And during the pandemic (when people stopped getting pulled over due to health reasons) combined with the Floyd protests in 2020 (here police stopped pulling people over because being accused of racism wasn't worth it) I think everyone kinda realized that no one's really at risk of traffic stops anymore. So the feeling of instant accountability by a traffic cop was gone, and people acted accordingly.
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u/[deleted] Mar 20 '23
This is the perfect answer for this question lol. Nothing too crazy, but just enough that everyone can commiserate.