Honking In Traffic Reduces Everyone’s Quality Of Life

Why your growing impatience makes your life miserable and how to change it

Hello out there - in a rushed world,

Here comes your weekly permission to Un-rush and Stress Less.

Timeless insights and impulses on how the power of slow helps you grow - in a rushing world crushing your life

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INSIGHT

Honking In Traffic Reduces Everyone’s Quality Of Life Without Improving The Honker’s

Why your growing impatience makes your life miserable and how to change it

We are all stuck in the same traffic.

Why do people think that honking in traffic will speed things up? Car horns are meant to be a tool to improve traffic safety and avoid car accidents, but when hearing the impatient sound of a car horn, many drivers react with anger and frustration. And that in turn can lead to road rage. Because the message of the honking is most likely to tell you to hurry up.

A pointless disruption like honking reduces everyone else’s quality of life without improving the honker’s.

How Exactly Does Honking Move The Traffic Forward?

Does honking accomplish anything, does it speed up traffic, or does it just make drivers angrier?

I am looking at the constant noise of honking cars around us in traffic-filled cities. The streets are already messy and crowded, which only adds to our stress, and now people are adding an ongoing concert of horns to the mix, especially during peak times.

And it drives us nuts because we cannot change it, we feel at the mercy of fate and our sole defense mechanism is the useless damn horn.

We Are Not In Control And It Drives Us Nuts

Honking is symptomatic of other modern-day illnesses we carry around with us. Our inability to deal with slowness, to be patient, to not get from A to B fast enough, to sit in silence, to not have our frustration under control, to constantly push others so that we can satisfy those who in turn push us more quickly.

Let’s admit it, no sane honker can seriously believe that his honking makes the traffic go faster. But to have no influence, no control over certain situations, and to deal with uncertainty and patience is not exactly part of our behavioral portfolio anymore these days.

In today’s world, we feel being entitled to have things move at the speed we desire.

So, we make ourselves miserable because we waste our time on feeling impatient and frustrated.

Pushing To Move Faster Is Counterproductive

From research on traffic, we can learn that impatient driving behavior actually slows you down. Creeping closer and closer towards the vehicle in front of you while waiting at the red light is self-defeating. Once traffic starts moving, you have to accelerate more slowly than you would otherwise do to avoid rear-ending the car ahead.

Pushing for quick decision-making often leads to wrong decisions. This is not about intuitive quick decision-making in dangerous situations, but in daily life situations where we encounter endless moments where we feel under pressure to make immediate decisions. Our work output gets worse because we don’t give it the time it needs, superficiality, low quality, uninformed decisions.

The Curse Of Impatience

The faster life moves, the more impatient we become. We get used that everything we do, touch, and move keeps going faster. We keep developing, we keep accelerating, so our expectations accelerate as well. Likewise, we have become a society addicted to speed.

„In a world of dishwashers and jet engines, time ought to feel more expansive, thanks to all the hours freed up for more meaningful matters. But, of course, that’s not how it feels. Instead, we grow more agitated with even the smallest delay". – Oliver Burkeman

The Non-Acceptance Of Certain Realities

Almost every evening I find myself wanting to turn the clock back for an hour. I am not quite done yet with (all) the things I intend to do. Can I not just have one more hour, so I can get that one thing done, please? I don’t accept the reality of what the clock tells me.

Do you catch yourself getting annoyed that the web page you try to pull up takes a brief moment to appear? And we are talking meanwhile about fractions of moments, yet we still want that website to show up faster.

We want instant gratification and are unwilling to accept that certain activities take time.

When you give in and accept that you can't beat the clock and that things happen when they do, you dive into the present and embrace the virtues of being patient.

Patience Is Your Key To A Happy Life

Good things come to those who wait. No joke. Even in this speed-addicted world.

Patience is essential to daily life, and it might be your key to a happier life.

Religions and philosophers have long praised the virtue of patience. But today's society only holds such beliefs when supported by solid evidence.

Studies have found that good things really DO come to those who wait.

Here are a few benefits of cultivating patience that science has figured out. 

• Improved health

Patient people tend to experience fewer negative emotions or depression because patience makes you calm down in upsetting or stressful situations.

• Better relationships with others

Kindness is certainly one trait of patient people, so is being tolerant, generous, compassionate, and forgiving. They also tend to be less lonely because making and keeping friends often requires a good dose of patience.

• Achieving goals

Climbing Mount Everest, building a business, teaching your toddler, or learning a skill – all require patience to get there. The digital world has trained us well to expect immediate results. Studies found that patient people display more effort toward their goals and are more satisfied when they achieve them. This also led to greater contentment with their lives as a whole.

Final Thought

Next time, when someone honks at you out of frustration, it’s important to take a deep breath, relax, and go about your day without making the situation worse by absorbing the other person’s impatience.

Patience is a skill you can practice.

Your benefits: patience lowers your daily stress level, and improves your health, your relationships, and your efforts to achieve your goals

photo © RedCharlie

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IMPULSES

Curated stories on the topic of slowing down and stressing less, designed to open up new ways of looking at why you should give yourself permission to un-rush.

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The Good News.

Face-to-face good old customer service beats screen shopping

We are human. Humans want personal interaction, relationships, and real-life feel-good experiences. Brick-and-mortar stores with good old customer service win over the distant, cold online shopping activity.

You can’t beat human interaction, face-to-face conversations, asking about products, touching them, and receiving excellent customer service. Physical retail stores are back without breaking their necks over their social media presence. They are focused on offering highly personal customer service, designed to make an impression and make the customer feel good. In the post-pandemic years, consumers were eager to return to physical stores and more than 16,000 stores opened in the US in 2022/2023.

These high-touch customer service experiences return to the traditional, old-fashioned ways that shopkeepers have built relationships with their clients. But in a world where consumers increasingly interact with brands online, these personalized interactions with a brand feel novel and special.

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Reflect.

“More than taking up time, these high-functioning, high-achieving people have found that mindfulness practice creates time.”  - Amishi Jha, Director of the Contemplative Neuroscience for the Mindfulness Research and Practice Initiative at University of Miami