On people, part one

A lot has been said about what people do in their cars while driving. People have talked about witnessing commuters shaving, eating full-course meals, and reading newspapers while in traffic. This fascinates me. Not that people are so desperately deprived of time for these things, but that they are put on display for everyone to see.

Ever since i was little, i've imagined that there is a bubble around every car on the highway. As we drift past vehicles in the other lanes, for a brief moment we are traveling on the same road at the same speed, in the same place at the same time. I always glance at that person in the other car, not to be nosy, but to see if they glance back: to see if they are just as interested in my life as I am in theirs. For that short time, your lives are connected, and that glance is all the communication you will ever have with that person. In the age of facebook, where a mere acquaintance can be labeled as a "friend" and remembered forever, this is a powerful concept. You only have a few seconds to meet this person, and only a few seconds to realize that their life isn't that different than your own. They, too have much too much to do and much too little time to do it in. They, too, are overwhelmed with thoughts and plans.
Here in America, we are famous for busying ourselves. Employers in Britain are required to give their workers 20 days of paid vacation time per year; the average in America is half that. We like to complicate our lives and stretch ourselves too thin.
We worry about our lives a whole lot.
But hardly ever do we worry about people.

I'm not talking about people you know well, or even only vaguely know. Everyone cares about their friends. But to a certain extent, that's just the same as caring about ourselves: our friends are part of our lives. Caring about them is, in effect, caring about ourselves. Never do we think about the lives of others- those people we pass on the highway, those people who we don't know, and whose lives couldn't possibly affect our own. After a few seconds, their life is once again unimportant to us. We go on with our day as normal, unaware of the condition of that individual. This is something that I would like to unsubscribe to.