Picture this: You’re driving along, having a morning coffee and vibing to some tunes. Suddenly, the guy behind you pulls out into oncoming traffic, cuts back in front of you, and slams on their brakes to make a turn. You hit the brakes to avoid a collision and spill coffee on your clean shirt.
Your blood boils.
You jink over and tail him down a side street, intent on telling him exactly what you think of his driving, dodging tricycles and pedestrians, yelling obscenities through an open window. Eventually, your coffee goes flying through that same window, smack into the other guy’s face. If you’re lucky, he drives away. If not, he does something much worse in return.
That’s road rage. You know it’s wrong. You know it’s dangerous. You don’t care. The red mist sets in and you lose control.
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But why?
Piloting a two ton terrestrial transport has a weird effect on people. You lose all sense of self. Recall the famous tagline Jinba Ittai, or “Horse and Rider as One?” Try “Monster and Rider”—Kaiju Ittai—and you get closer to describing how people become more aggressive behind the wheel of a car. The larger and more powerful, the more inflated their sense of invulnerability and impunity becomes.
In the same way that online anonymity encourages users to insult or berate people from behind a phone screen, that anonymizing metal cocoon insulates drivers from the consequences of their own actions. They curse others out loud or worse.
There’s also a surprising correlation between car stickers and aggressive driving. People who use cars as mobile billboards to project their feelings/politics/insecurities out to the world are more likely to engage in road rage than those who don’t.
And this leads to another factor: that sense of possession over your automobile. For many drivers, it is the castle from which we rule our small patch of road. From which you can mouth an exasperated “PI mo!” at other motorists without fear of reprisal or being canceled.
But this, paradoxically, makes you feel more vulnerable. Every threat to your castle becomes a threat to you. Paranoia builds. People are out to get you. You’re right, everyone else is evil. And stupid. George Carlin’s infamous observation: “Anyone who’s driving slower than you is an idiot, anyone who’s driving faster than you is a maniac” is apt. We start to believe that everyone else is a worse driver than we are and that every time they block us in traffic or cut us off, it’s personal.
The constant micro-aggressions and aggravation of jostling in traffic increases this perception of danger and heightens your stress level. At some point, something snaps. Enough is enough. You go on the offensive. You’ve reached the point where you just don’t care if they do hear what you say, or if your fist dislocates someone’s jaw.
But hold on, let’s rewind: How do we get out of this mess?
There are various factors contributing to road rage. Stress. Traffic. Aggression. Pent-up anger. Reducing the rage can sometimes be as simple as minimizing these factors. Avoid traffic. Choose a less stressful car to drive. Driving something big, powerful and expensive through crawling traffic can be more vexing than driving a scratched-up secondhand something that you won’t mind collecting a few dings on from the random kamote.
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Change your philosophy of driving: Slow is fast. The sooner you stop taking every gap in traffic as an opportunity to get ahead, the sooner you realize that hanging back and waiting for better opportunities gets you through almost as fast and with less friction. Let needlessly aggressive people past. Never mind that it messes with your internal sense of justice. You’re not the MMDA. It isn’t your job to pull up to a traffic stop just to tell someone they’re an asshole.
Sometimes measures you take for “protection” may contribute to road rage. Keeping a pipe or baseball bat under your seat “just in case” puts you in the state of mind to use it. As a former colleague with a permit to carry once told me, he had reached a point where he was unconsciously reaching for the gun in the glove box when other drivers started acting strangely aggressively towards him. Instinct, security training and the presence of the gun simply heightened his stress and paranoia. He eventually decided to leave it at home, in fear of what he might do if pushed too far.
And this awareness of how little it takes to anger you is one of the main keys to avoiding road rage. Personally, over the decades, I’ve become keenly aware of how hunger and stress affect my emotional state. I can feel when traffic and stress is wearing me down, and often choose to abort and park the car.
It’s not a race. We’re not running the 24 Hours of Les Manila here. There’s no shame in taking an extended pit stop to shake your legs, take a bathroom break, and have a candy bar. Sidestepping the stress of rush hour traffic can save you gas, save you stress, and and save your life.
If you have no choice but to be on the road, or to get back on it, it pays to remember that nobody cares about you here. Frustrating you isn’t their sole purpose in life. Most drivers and riders who cut in front of you don’t even know you are there. Take a deep breath. Calm yourself. Evade collisions and avoid confrontations at all costs. Once that kamote is past you, they’re someone else’s problem. Take a nice picture with your dashcam for the LTO, if you’d like, but directly confronting them almost never ends well for anyone.
And if you find yourself in a situation where you’ve caused road rage in another driver, the right thing to do is to apologize. Whether or not you are at fault. Even if you think this is a fight you can win, do you really want to spend the next several hours at the police station? Or the hospital? I’ve been there. The moral high ground doesn’t pay for court fees or hospital bills.
And that’s the long and short of it. Road rage isn’t healthy, and denying that you have it does you no good. But actively addressing the problem, keeping calm and carrying on, and giving way to other drivers allows you to lessen their stress as well, reducing the rage for everyone around you.
Might not seem like much, but every little act of kindness makes the road safer for everyone. And that’s all that matters.
