Cars

Cars are problematical in terms of the environment, since both their use and manufacture are polluting in the extreme, but that to me is not the real problem. The real problem of cars is convenience and laziness.

Cars make travel and transport of goods easy and convenient. Your nearest source of food can be 50km away and you will never starve as long as you have a car. You can move a ton of stuff around with no more effort than loading and unloading, and then the insufferably arduous task of flexing your ankle to press down on the accelerator.

The problem with this is that the easier the car makes it for us, the harder it becomes for the unaided human to do that same work. Not having to use our bodies for anything, our bodies become physically weak, which makes the work of transport even more difficult than it would have been before.

This makes us dependent on our cars, but that dependency did not exist before we had the car.

This is almost the same mechanism which fuels our feelings of dependency on substances like caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, cocaine, &c. Nicotine is addictive precisely because it creates the need for itself: if you never smoke a cigarette, you will never feel like you need to smoke a cigarette (unless made to feel that way by someone who is themselves addicted or who has a monetary interest in you becoming an addict). The “withdrawal” you experience is for a substance which was artificially introduced, and the “need” you feel is the need created by a thing you don’t actually need.

So the problem of cars actually isn’t that they are environmentally damaging. No. The problem with cars is that we depend on them more than we should, and that dependency leads us to use them to the point where they are damaging for us physically and environmentally. Just like with tobacco; the individual cigarette is only minutely harmful and leaves zero lasting damage. But smoke enough cigarettes and the damage becomes obvious and potentially deadly.

So, the problem of cars is addiction. And the problem with addiction is that it makes you use something innocuous to the point where it becomes harmful. Our addiction to cars has made us weak and lazy, and therefore unwilling to do any of the things that would be beneficial for ourselves and the world we live in, because the problem is too big and too hard and we can’t be bothered.

Weakness

I’m not at all as macho as using the word weak might make me sound. But the fact is that an easy life is an unsatisfying one, and weakness becomes ever more the central feature of our self-image the more dependent we become on our technologies. Feeling incapable makes us turn outwards and lean on substances and services we don’t actually need, and therefore (more importantly) in economic and emotional thrall to the people who provide them for us. I’m not saying you should re-shingle your roof yourself or build your own washing machine, but it’s pretty pathetic that most people need to call an electrician to change a light fixture or call a plumber to fix a leaky faucet.

Most of the problems in the world at the moment are the result of people feeling dis-empowered to tell fuckheads like Elon and Bezos and Zuckerberg to go fuck themselves. Each of them (and many more like them, AKA. most politicians) has isolated a particular weak spot within us and exploited it ruthlessly. Elon: our addiction to cars and our desire to be seen as on the bleeding edge of technology. Bezos: Convenience and poverty. Zuckerberg: loneliness and the craving for human connection.

The car is not the cause of this, and more than ElBeZuck is, but they are excellent examples of the general problem. We don’t need facebook to have friends, and yet for most people FB seems obligatory to “real” friendship. We don’t need to have 9-volt batteries delivered to our doorstep by Amazon, any more than we need an electric car to spare us the 20 minute walk to the grocery store.

There are things we cannot make ourselves and these include literally everything we depend on individually and collectively. Even forging a crude iron cooking pot requires highly specialised knowledge and expertise in metallurgy that none of us has, and which it would be ridiculous to expect all of us to develop. Ditto x1,000,000 for an old Nokia brick phone, let alone the latest touch-screen miracle produced in the highly mechanised factories of China.

Effort

The conclusion I am trying to push towards here is that satisfaction comes from fruitful effort. Cycling/walking/rollerblading across town to a friend’s place is magnitudes more satisfying than driving, and orders of magnitude more than taking public transit. Most people avoid the effort of moving themselves across any great distance, not because they actually can’t do it (illness and injury very much aside), but because they have convinced themselves that they are “lazy,” or because they “can’t be bothered.”

I don’t mean to sound uncharitable, but these are excuses and lies. Period. While rest and relaxation are necessary, human beings are doers of things and being or feeling prohibited from doing stuff makes us depressed, and anxious, and we feel weak, small, and powerless. Too much rest destroys body and mind exactly as too much work does. So if you’re feeling dead inside, maybe it’s because your “labour saving devices” are killing you.