A pastor from northern Florida spoke at my church recently and mentioned how drivers in New York start to honk if cars don’t move immediately after the stoplight turns green. Something different from life in the south? It’s something I’ve paid more attention to since then, and he was right. All the cars around me on the road do it. I do it sometimes. And it definitely became more obvious when I got rear-ended last week after the car in front of me took an extra second to start driving after the light turned green.
One of my psychology professors once told us about her friend who moved from Pittsburgh to New York. He noticed that while people in Pittsburgh would form a sort of line and wait for one person to get their drink from the fountain drink dispensers, people in New York all crowd there and get their drink simultaneously.
Where’s the fire? Everyone’s in such a rush to get from point A to point B. All the stress just takes years off our lives, and for some things (like driving or getting a soda), it’s pointless. And yet this is what the culture here is like. What’s everyone doing with the extra minutes they “save” anyway? This is exhausting; I wish everything would just slow down a little.
