Alone in a Car
Three Things #107: February 18, 2024
Last week I finished a cross-country road trip. It was the third time I’ve driven across the United States. It’s a big country and it takes a long time to cross by car, even driving fast and driving many hours per day. Most of my friends and family think I’m crazy for making these trips but I’ve always enjoyed them and found them to be a very unique opportunity to see and do things I wouldn’t otherwise. They also give me a rare opportunity to spend some quiet time alone and think, something I almost never get to do these days.
Like anything that requires a real investment of time these trips have their ups and downs. There are moments of unexpected joy, moments of excitement, and also scary, frustrating, exhausting moments. Like running a marathon, towards the end of each trip I questioned my decision and told myself I’d never do it again, but sure enough I’ve done it again twice so far and now, a few days after the third trip, I almost feel ready to do it again.
Here are some of the reasons why.
Thing #1: Man-Machine Symbiosis 🚗
I spend a heck of a lot of time working with machines. Most of these machines are computers of course but I’ve always been attracted to machines of all kinds. I was the sort of kid who took apart and then tried, often unsuccessfully, to put back together any machine he could get his hands on: not only computers but also clocks, radios, toaster ovens, you name it.
Once in a long while, when I work with a particular machine for a long enough time and when I start to both understand and trust it, I begin to develop a strange sort of affection for it. I can count on one hand the number of times this has happened. I felt this way about my first Mac laptop, a first-generation Macbook Air, around 12 years ago because it got me through grad school and because it was also the machine I used to start—and code—my first startup. I took it everywhere with me and, yes, even slept with it from time to time. I may have felt this way about a mobile phone once or twice. And I probably felt this way about my first gaming computer back in high school.
I was vaguely aware that it’s possible to feel this way about a larger machine. I’ve seen the way old pilots get to know their aircraft after a while—the most famous fictional example of this is probably Han Solo and the Millennium Falcon. And I’ve met soldiers that felt this way about a helicopter, a tank, or even a gun—which, yes, they also slept with—because it kept them alive in very stressful, dangerous situations.
In my case it happened with a car. Which is especially interesting because I never fell in love with a car before. I’ve owned a few but mostly didn’t drive during the 22 years between high school and the present, during which I’ve almost entirely lived in big cities where I didn’t need one. When I did own or rent a car it was purely utilitarian and transactional: get in, get somewhere, get out, thank you very much.
But there’s something different about a solo cross-country roadtrip. That car was literally my only companion for dozens of hours and thousands of miles. I sort of lived out of it. Yes, I slept and showered in hotels and at friends’ houses, but I spent more hours in the car: mostly driving, but also reading and listening to podcasts and audiobooks, working, eating, sleeping, taking calls, working out, etc. I laughed and I cried in that car. I entrusted it with all of my belongings. I’m aware that there are many people who are forced to live in their car. While I don’t think that would be terribly pleasant and I doubt many would do it by choice, I didn’t mind it for a few days.
Over the course of such a long trip I became intimately familiar with every quirk of the car’s behavior. I learned exactly how long it needed to charge, even when the car’s own estimate was wrong. I learned how this varied depending on the temperature and weather. I learned how the performance would change depending on the conditions and the battery. I learned how to get the climate control just right at different times of day. I learned what happened if I left the car for an hour, or a day, or a week. I learned how to keep all of the screens, windows, and mirrors clean. I learned the location of every scratch on the body. I learned how much following distance I need on the highway, and when I should pass and when I shouldn’t. I figured out how to adjust all of the settings on the driver seat to get it just right. I got to the point where, backing up or squeezing into tight spaces, I almost felt like the car was an extension of my own body: I barely needed to check the sensors or camera because I could just feel where the car ended. And I discovered little features and gimmicks that I hadn’t been aware of even after driving the car for nearly a decade.
What’s more, I encountered some quite extreme weather on the trip—which I suppose I deserve for attempting it in the middle of winter. The first few days the weather was bitter cold, well below freezing. The car kept me warm and cozy. I drove through some intense rain storms, at night, on unfamiliar roads, in fog and in the mountains. It was white-knuckle driving but the car performed admirably and I felt safe the entire time. I ran into an unexpected blizzard a day or two before the end of the trip when I gained altitude and the car handled well and kept me safe even in treacherous, snowy highway conditions with extremely limited visibility.
Finally, the last day of the trip was the scariest and most challenging—the final boss, so to speak. In the span of one day I drove through a blizzard into a desert, got stuck for over three hours on a remote highway that was closed due to a terrible accident, and finally had to navigate one final intense rainstorm and flooded highways. I slowed down where necessary but always kept moving forward through all of these conditions, and always felt totally in control, even when hitting a flooded road at nearly 70 mph. This is testament to the vastness and diversity of climate in this great country, to the incredible technology present in modern vehicles, and to my own car keeping me safe and sound.
On the last day of the trip I was so stressed out and exhausted—I spent 14 hours on the road (kids, don’t try this at home)—that I found myself talking to the car. I rubbed her dashboard a few times and said things like, “Let’s go home” and “We’re going to be fine.” I called her by name. And as I’ve continued to drive her around town the past few days after the trip I’ve noticed that I feel more in control and more comfortable behind the wheel than I did before, and more than I ever thought possible. Driving has become totally effortless, even more than before.
I’ve never felt this way with any vehicle or any machine before. I think I finally understand the way Han felt about the Falcon. He knew how to push her and how much she could take. He knew her limits and he could coax her into doing things that no other pilot could. She was his companion after a fashion.
We were thinking about selling this car since it’s nearly 10 years old and probably time to upgrade. But I don’t think I can sell her anymore. I think I’ll drive her until she falls apart, and maybe then some.
I don’t know whether or not it’s strange to form a bond with a car, but as a technologist and product designer I think there are some important lessons here. We should all strive to design and build machines that people can fall in love with, that they never want to sell or give away and that, if you took away, they’d be very unhappy. We should design and build products and machines that people can form real connections with! It’s not an aspect of product design I ever seriously thought about before. And it’s more possible today than ever before.
Thing #2: The Power of Home 🏡
Before starting a family the idea of home didn’t mean terribly much to me. It was a place to shower, to sleep, and to eat the occasional meal. I generally tried to spend as little time at home as possible because I felt that time at home was time wasted—time that could’ve been better spent exploring, socializing, exercising, working, or doing something else productive. I never equated home with productivity and I never invested much in my home. Home always felt transient. To put things in perspective, over a span of about ten years, from undergrad to my first few years of work to grad school and startup life, I moved 17 times.
And then I decided to try the nomad life. For three or four years I traveled between half and full time. I moved around constantly, never staying in one place longer than about three weeks. I visited and spent time in dozens of countries, had great experiences, and built relationships with amazing people. I don’t regret any of this and I’m glad I got it out of my system. It took a pandemic, marriage, homeownership, and the birth of my first child to slow down and to start investing in home.
Since then I’ve made a complete about-face. I still love travel, I know I always will, but I love being at home way more and I now realize how unproductive I am on the road and how productive I am at home. It used to be the case that every time I came back from a trip, no matter how far, how long, or how stressful, I’d start hankering to depart again within days of coming home. That doesn’t happen anymore. The urge is still there but it’s muted and dominated by the comforts and joys of home, from being in control of my schedule, to making a proper coffee in the morning, to having my own workspace to, of course, the joy of spending time with family and with my son in particular.
I spent about two weeks on the road on this recent road trip. That counts as a long trip for me these days. It was a fun, rewarding trip. There were adventures and learning and reconnecting with old friends. There were new experiences in new places. There was plenty of much-needed alone time and reflection time. I don’t regret a single moment of the trip. But by the end of the trip I was very ready to be home.
One of our great failings as humans is our inability to appreciate what’s right in front of us, no matter how rare or special. I’m guilty of this and I know it. I’ve always appreciated the dichotomy of the two modes I live in: home mode and away mode. The grass is always greener on the other side. When I’m home, I recall and romanticize the adventure of being on the road and miss it greatly. When I’m on the road, I miss home terribly. And the first few days back from a trip are so sweet because I feel like I’m seeing home with fresh eyes and newfound appreciation. This time was no exception.
On the last night of the trip—the very stressful night I described above, after fourteen hours on the road—when I finally saw the lights of the city, I cried. I felt an incredible sense of accomplishment, having safely and efficiently driven thousands of miles and achieved my goal. I felt gratitude for making it back safely. I felt total exhaustion and surrender. I felt a little sadness and ennui that another epic trip was coming to an end. Most of all I felt the joy and relief of being home. When I actually got home, quite late at night, I wanted to kneel down and kiss the ground.
I feel this way at the end of every trip but for some reason this time it was more acute. I think it’s because the trip was so long and so exhausting, especially towards the end. I felt so blessed to have a home and a family to come back to. This feeling persisted for days, and I still feel it now more than a week later. Coming home felt almost surreal given how far I traveled and how far away home felt for days.
What’s interesting about this experience is that I actually often travel much further from home. I realized that there’s something about the magical speed of airplanes vs. the long, slow grind of driving thousands of miles to get home. There’s something about approaching slowly from a distance, 100 miles and an hour or two at a time, seeing the landscape gradually transform, but not quite being home until you are. Something about being on the road makes you feel further from home than you really are; something about the sameness of airports makes you feel closer to home than you really are.
I’ve never appreciated coming home more and I intend to meditate on this feeling and reflect on it every day, reminding myself every day on the road how wonderful it will feel to be home, and reminding myself every day at home how lucky I am to be there.
There’s some rare magic in home. Never take home for granted.
Thing #3: Know Thyself 💡
Something important happens when we spend time alone. We can’t fully understand ourselves and the world around us, or really anything at all for that matter, without ample alone time for contemplation and reflection.
Having said this, I get vanishingly little time to myself on a day to day basis. I consider this a blessing and I’d rather have too little alone time than too much of it, but one of my main motivations for taking such a long road trip was a desire to have some time to myself. In the event I had no shortage of time alone. Time alone is not a panacea and it doesn’t solve all the ills in the world but it is necessary for a healthy, functional mind. And on this trip it allowed me to discover a few things about myself, something that doesn’t happen terribly often at my age.
One thing I realized is how little I need to be comfortable, happy, and fulfilled. My day to day life is quite full, not just with people and tasks but with things: objects, devices, gizmos and gadgets, books, content, software, paraphernalia, clothing. It feels like there’s stuff everywhere. I don’t have one outfit, I have dozens. I don’t have one pair of shoes, I have at least a dozen. I have seven or eight computers at home that I use from time to time for different purposes (I know this is a bit extreme but it’s both my profession and my guilty pleasure). I have bags and boxes and sacks for storing and moving all of the stuff around. I have things I only use once a year, and things I’ve only used once ever but can’t bring myself to discard. (At least I have only one car!)
I’ve always known, I think, that I don’t need 80-90% of this stuff, mainly because if you hid it I’d probably never notice that it was gone. And I travel without much stuff, which is also a good exercise. I can travel more or less indefinitely with just a backpack and, assuming I packed intelligently and am not covering too many seasons or crazy activities, never feel like I’m missing anything. It’s really remarkable to me that I can fit everything I need for days or weeks into one tiny bag, while the stuff cluttering up my home and my life takes up literally hundreds of square feet.
In any case, the road trip was a good reminder of how little I actually need to feel comfortable and for life to be more or less complete.
Another thing I realized is how goal-oriented I am. Other than alone time to think, my two other big goals for the road trip were to stay on top of work and, well, to drive safely. Driving turns out to be an extremely quantitative, linear, mindless, structured task that’s easy to measure and for which it’s easy to track progress. I found that I’d spend more time than I probably should every day reviewing the previous day’s route and planning the next day’s, optimizing details like where I’d stop for lunch and to charge the car. This ate away at the time I planned to get “real” work done.
I realized something important about myself: I can’t help but do these “easy” tasks first, and it’s only once they’re out of the way that I can focus on harder work. Planning and executing a long road trip is sort of the perfect trap for me because it checks so many boxes: I like operations, I like linear, quantitative, structured tasks, I like travel and adventure, and I needed to plan each day’s route anyway. This realization will be helpful in planning how to allocate my time more efficiently.
Finally, my biggest realization is that I’m capable of a lot more than I thought, but I also have a lot of work to do on overcoming anxiety and achieving some degree of control over my emotions. I wrote about discovering what I’m capable of before in the context of running my first marathon and it’s an idea I’ve been fascinated with ever since: that even things that feel completely impossible can begin to feel possible and even probable with enough gradual practice.
On this trip I set out planning to be on the road about four hours per day. That felt like my sweet spot, the amount of driving I could do comfortably and without stress. I upped that to six and then, keen to get home, to eventually eight to ten (including stops for charging). I did three or four eight to ten hour days on the road. On top of this, as mentioned above, I ended up driving through some pretty gnarly conditions which made things more stressful and exhausting. If you had asked me before the trip whether I could safely drive ten hours in a day I would’ve laughed at you. The most I’d ever done before was about six, and that was really pushing it.
In the event it was like anything else: incremental. I built up to it. And while I was totally exhausted at the end of eight or ten hours of driving, taking lots of short breaks helped, and I always got a good night’s sleep and was totally ready to keep driving in the morning. So far so good.
But on the final day, as mentioned above, I was on the road for 14 hours. I had planned eight or nine hours but a bunch of things happened, including getting stuck when a major highway closed. This was an intensely stressful, challenging experience. It may not sound so terrible, but coming as it did at the end of a trip, late in the day when I was already exhausted from travel and dying to be home, I found it to be an extraordinary test. Three hours is a very long time to sit alone in a car. Towards the end I genuinely began to worry that I was going to be there all night. The internet wasn’t working on my phone so I couldn’t find out what was going on. There was no information on the radio either. I think it was the uncertainty that really bothered me.
I tried and mostly failed to sleep. I tried and mostly failed to meditate. I think of myself as a pretty calm person who can relax himself in just about any situation, but I failed pretty terribly on this occasion. It was extremely eye-opening. And it was such a strange, unfortunate situation—a “one in a million” sort of event. In all my life I’ve never experienced anything like it before and never even heard of it happening to anyone else.
The fact that it came right at the very end of an extremely long trip when I was almost home makes me want to say something like, “God was testing me.” I thought about that fact as I continued to wait. I reminded myself that it could’ve been worse. I was in my own car. I was only a few hours away from home. I had water and food, and I was warm, and would have made it through the night if I had been forced to. It wasn’t snowing or bitter cold outside. I reminded myself of all of these things. But my doubts and anxiety continued to bother me until, suddenly, things started moving again, and I eventually, finally made it home a few hours later.
It was a powerful experience and one I’ll not soon forget. Sometimes we need to go through these extreme, stressful situations to better understand who we are, what matters the most to us, what our limitations are, and the ways in which we still need to improve. I’m capable of many things, and of more than I think I am, but I’m still a long way from enlightenment. It’s good to be reminded of this from time to time.