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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

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Photo by Aaron Huber on Unsplash

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?

If the person driving in front of you is using their phone and doesn’t see that the traffic light is green, or if the car in front of them is long gone, we can honk to wake them up.

But here we are talking about 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.

We are all stuck in the same traffic, and honking the horn does not help the traffic to suddenly and miraculously clear up.

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…

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Claudia Brose
Claudia Brose

Written by Claudia Brose

Writer, Event-Creator, Marketing Professional turned Rebel against a rushed world | Japan mad | Cyclist | Get my Newsletter Un-Rush claudiabrose.substack.com

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