Art by 井町 透
I am an American. I grew up in the midwest, about an hour outside Minneapolis. My parents were well-off and well-connected. There wasn't a whole lot they could do for me within the confines of our small town, so, as a kid, they frequently took me outside of it. We'd go here and there, various places in the state during the summer. And once every year or two, we'd go on a big road trip out west.
I loved it out west. The car rides were long and dull, but they bought me a DS to shut me up (which was about 50% effective). The scenery though, was breathtaking. I still remember the first time I saw the South Dakota badlands. It really felt like another world. As I aged, I became hungrier and hungrier for that feeling of awe and discovery.
Of course, I was still a kid in a medium-sized town in the midwest. I couldn't exactly walk places. And even as a kid with unlimited free time, the buses were impractical. I think I might have boarded a bus in my hometown once. I didn't have any money and the bus driver gave me a ticket to be paid the next time I ride. There was never a next time.
As I got older, my summers were defined by walking. I would walk for hours with my friends and just talk. Back then, smartphones still weren't available to poor people like my friends. And phone games hadn't yet solved enough human psychology to consume your entire life. So, we simply walked and made our own fun. The walks got longer and longer as we got older and less impressed by the slice of town within two miles of my house. The solution was obvious, of course: Walk further.
It got to a point where we were walking for 8+ hours a day. I don't think we ever took food with us, just water, and not much of it. We'd set out in the morning and return close to sunset. Not every day, of course. We had computers and played ridiculous amounts of Minecraft, too. But in terms of pure hours, walking and talking was dominant. It was the default.
Eventually, I learned to drive, and my parents bought me a car. Then my whole life went to shit.
Having a car wasn't actually the problem. My life being ass and me having a car were purely coincidental. But at the same time I got the car, a lot of other shit was going on. I don't feel any desire to recount the entire tale of my academic career, so here's the abridged version: I skipped grades, plural, starting in 1st grade, and that meant I essentially maintained two separate friend groups for most of my adolescence. One group of people my age, from my old class, which almost immediately dwindled down to just two or three people. And another, larger group of people in the same classes as me, who were much older. In high school, a new friend group formed, and I started drifting away from my long-time 1st grade friends.
Right when I got my car, a lot of things changed. You remember back in 2015 or 2016 when everyone became alt-right for a minute? I got swept up in that, through my new high school friend group. I changed a lot as a person during this time, mostly for the worse. It's funny how horrible high school is for literally everyone.
During this time, I also began to have pretty significant mental health issues. I began to feel that the people around me just didn't understand me (true), that they didn't actually like me (half-true), and that things would be better if I simply stopped existing (probably not true, but I guess we'll never know). And my solution to this was to start isolating myself. I would go to school in the morning, talk to no one, go through my classes participating as little as possible, pretend to be okay for our 25-minute lunch, and then after school, I'd go straight home and either sleep or get on the computer and talk to my new internet friends. Even my parents started asking me when I was going to start staying out late (seriously).
To that end, the car could not have come at a better or worse time. Suddenly here is this tool which allows me to go pretty much anywhere I want, at any time. And I can do it alone.
After school, I started driving to completely random places. I probably spent hundreds of dollars on gas, wordlessly meandering the same farms and suburbs I used to aimlessly stroll with my friends. At this point, I managed to get a schedule at school that let me out an hour before everyone else. Which meant now, there wasn't even a chance to run into someone who knew me before I left at the end of the day. But that was a good thing, to me. I had music to keep me company.
Up to now, I've been filling you in on a lot of details that aren't strictly necessary to my point. The purpose of everything above is just to set the scene for my relationship with cars. Cars were an escape for me. I would drive to avoid thinking about anything, to avoid being around anyone, and to avoid doing anything. Despite never once doing it professionally, I have the stamina of a long-haul truck driver because I spent thousands of dollars on gasoline and zero dollars on therapy.
I really loved driving.
Now let's fast forward past high school, and into college. Particularly, my last year of college, after the worst of my mental problems had passed and everyone was wrapping up school.
At this point, I'm set. I've got a killer job lined up. All my friends are jealous of me. Some of them aren't handling that especially well. And my car, once a tool of isolation, has become a social weapon I wield at my school. You see, many of my college friends were from places where they never learned to drive. So they became dependent on me for rides. And that meant I got to be useful to them doing something I liked doing anyway, and I got to spend a lot of time with them. Consequently, I quickly became the center of my friend group.
But that's starting to break down at this point. With my friends also preparing to enter the working world, they're learning to drive and getting cars of their own now. Which means they don't need me to drive them anymore. They're just as excited about driving as I was when I first learned. All these new places and possibilities!
But in their excitement to drive as much as possible, they stopped wanting me to drive them places. And so we started driving separately. And because they no longer needed to ask me for rides, I also stopped being involved in as much of their lives. We grew apart. School brought us together, but that was ending. And there was nothing to replace it with.
And so, like most Americans in this situation, we replaced it with... nothing.
We simply saw each other less. Many people decided that whatever issues we had weren't worth trying to solve, and decided to find other people. As people became busy with work, the already-fractured social system we had set up finally shattered. There was basically nothing keeping us together anymore. And so we mostly stopped hanging out.
All of this illustrates a complete arc of my relationship with cars. First, they were a home for exciting road trips out west. Then they turned into a symbol of independence and maturity, which quickly gave way to comfort and peace. In college, it became a social tool: something I used to defeat isolation even through the pandemic years that defined most of my college career. My car was a fun, social place. But as my friends too have gone through their own arcs of car ownership, that social utility has disappeared, and the comfort has faded. I now have a very expensive metal box in my garage that I see as a talisman of loneliness.
I fought the decline of my friend group for a while. But eventually I gave up. Coordinating activities is exhausting. It's even more exhausting when the people you're coordinating with seem indifferent to the possibility that you never hang out again. I became bitter and hostile to my friends, and I was much happier and more agreeable when I finally let go of the friend group. We still hang out sometimes, but I don't really go out of my way to make it happen anymore. But I learned a lot in my efforts. I really tried to identify the root causes of this issue. And I think I got somewhere.
Part 2 will be posted next week, detailing what I learned.