- #1
jammieg
I live in a city with heavy traffic and often times at a stop light I see the cars in front of me inch forward a bit with no place to go because the light has not changed, other times a whole bunch of cars inch up because someone else inched up, sometimes people leave a few car lengths in front of them so they can perform the inching game and often the people behind them feel compelled to inch up with them.
This seems like a perfectly illogical behavior to me, there doesn't seem to be any good reason to play the inching game and since I don't play it never made much sense to me. About 1 in 10 drivers are initiators of the inching game and of those there seems to be a correlation to being generally inconsiderate or poor drivers in such things as weaving, driving too fast, not using signals, or generally being inattentive. I also feel compelled to inch forward as they inch forward and sometimes reflexively inch forward because they did and I wasn't paying attention and sometimes I slowly back up when others inch forward which really must look strange, but my point is that I don't think they are doing it consciously I think that it is a behavior that they picked up when others were doing this to them and they made a decision at some point to send out what they were receiving or irritate others that irritated them and so they now do it whithout thinking about it, although underneath it is giving them little increments of a false sense of control over other people and in some way pleasurable and giving a general feeling of being in control while driving that they may have become unaware of.
There could be a lot of reasons, sometimes we get tired of holding the break down, sometimes they tell me people are trying to anticipate the light changing green but I think that is more often just a rationalization of people who play the inching game and don't want to admit that they like taking control over others in this way. My other point is that if they are unaware of it there are likely many things we do that we are unaware of and are not as obviously illogical behaviors that give false senses of control or senses of control that really are not very productive perhaps even counter productive. Along these speculative lines of faulty reasoings that lead to less or counter productive behavior that lead to senses of control I wonder what other things might people do...Does one get pleasure from being in control of another however slight or wrong or right it may be? Don't some people take the practice of controlling others too far into realms of not caring if it harms others in some way? Could the basic rule of this be that at some point we learned that to control things feels good, but we also learned from experience that others are just like us and trying to control each other leads to bad things for both and that we are better off to respect each other and to respect those inanimate things that in trying to take control over can adversely affect us.
This seems like a perfectly illogical behavior to me, there doesn't seem to be any good reason to play the inching game and since I don't play it never made much sense to me. About 1 in 10 drivers are initiators of the inching game and of those there seems to be a correlation to being generally inconsiderate or poor drivers in such things as weaving, driving too fast, not using signals, or generally being inattentive. I also feel compelled to inch forward as they inch forward and sometimes reflexively inch forward because they did and I wasn't paying attention and sometimes I slowly back up when others inch forward which really must look strange, but my point is that I don't think they are doing it consciously I think that it is a behavior that they picked up when others were doing this to them and they made a decision at some point to send out what they were receiving or irritate others that irritated them and so they now do it whithout thinking about it, although underneath it is giving them little increments of a false sense of control over other people and in some way pleasurable and giving a general feeling of being in control while driving that they may have become unaware of.
There could be a lot of reasons, sometimes we get tired of holding the break down, sometimes they tell me people are trying to anticipate the light changing green but I think that is more often just a rationalization of people who play the inching game and don't want to admit that they like taking control over others in this way. My other point is that if they are unaware of it there are likely many things we do that we are unaware of and are not as obviously illogical behaviors that give false senses of control or senses of control that really are not very productive perhaps even counter productive. Along these speculative lines of faulty reasoings that lead to less or counter productive behavior that lead to senses of control I wonder what other things might people do...Does one get pleasure from being in control of another however slight or wrong or right it may be? Don't some people take the practice of controlling others too far into realms of not caring if it harms others in some way? Could the basic rule of this be that at some point we learned that to control things feels good, but we also learned from experience that others are just like us and trying to control each other leads to bad things for both and that we are better off to respect each other and to respect those inanimate things that in trying to take control over can adversely affect us.