Why is everyone sitting in the car?

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

I’ve seen it, you’ve seen it; maybe you’ve done it, maybe you do it. Hanging out in the car, outside your house or apartment, outside work, chowing down in a parking lot. And I mean hanging out, spending long periods of time just sitting in the car, usually on the phone. When I first moved to Queens, New York about six years ago, I repeatedly found myself walking past one of my neighbors as he played games on his phone in the car outside his house at all hours of the day or night. There was nothing shocking about it, in fact it was so normal that I initially didn’t think twice. But over time, going by him again and again, I started to wonder, why?

Why sit in your car when the house is right there? Why spend so much time in that little box instead of inside with others? And the first answer might have to do with who is in the house, for a lot of people. But there’s more to it. Over the years I’ve seen more and more people spending more and more time in their cars, directly outside their homes, and my curiosity has slowly built.

You might think this situation so simple it doesn’t merit asking questions. People just want some time to themselves, they want time to decompress, they want time alone. And I’d agree with all that, but I’d also ask why. What is it about our lives that makes people want more and more time alone in their cars? What circumstances make people prefer the confines of their little vehicle to going into their house at night?

There’s a whole lot of reasons, and I think they tell us more about society than we might expect. First is work. I was talking to my partner about this the other day, and they described going from the car to the apartment after a long shift at their service job like going from the couch to the bed late at night. Exhaustion, plain and simple. And that’s an undeniable huge factor, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. We’re also looking at control, privacy, escape, and, ultimately, autonomy.

A lot of our jobs are exhausting from some combination of physical work, social energy expenditure, and mind-numbing tasks. But looming over it all is our lack of control. I don’t mind physical labor, but when I don’t have agency and have to exhaust myself for a job, for a boss, it’s a different story. What’s most frustrating here is that at work our time isn’t our own. Bosses, increasingly using software, decide the pace we should work at. They decide the routes drivers should take. They have a frustrating level of control over much of our lives. As Elizabeth Anderson says: “Most workplace governments in the United States are dictatorships, in which bosses govern in ways that are largely unaccountable to those who are governed. They don’t merely govern workers; they dominate them.”

This lack of agency, of control, is painful. It grates at something every single one of us desires: freedom, real freedom. So we leave work and we drive home. And as we get home we feel a moment of opportunity – the chance to feel a hint of freedom. In the privacy of our cars we get a little something that we’ve been denied at work. We get, for that little window, the chance to be masters of our domain. No urgent responsibilities, no one telling us what to do, the freedom to just mess around on the phone at our leisure, doing whatever we want with no demands placed upon us.

Of course we don’t just do this in the car, a lot of us do it as often as possible. Everywhere we go, we increasingly have the ability to tap into this small domain we carve out and created for ourselves. People throw on headphones to walk down the street and tune into their little curated world of music or podcasts. At work we might escape as often as possible into our curated social media feeds or games or videos. A lot of us want to tune out of jobs where we lack power, lack agency, so we seek out our domains, whether it’s our phone or the work bathroom or the car on a lunch break.

Photo by Max van den Oetelaar on Unsplash

None of this is perfect. We all know that somewhere. It’s a band-aid on a gaping wound. We might feel a level of control when we dive into the world of our phones, but we don’t really run the show there. We can make choices, but other people control the architecture. A handful of mega-corporations are really in charge. Sometimes I worry that people do conflate the ability we have to choose what content we consume with real autonomy. I’ll always remember a series of comments on TikTok where users were describing phones and apps as the new “third spaces.” For those who don’t know, third spaces are, “locations that facilitate social interaction outside of the people you live or work with and encourage public relaxation,” according to phrase-coiner Ray Oldenburg.

We need to hastily reject the idea of social media apps as third spaces both because the interactions they encourage are rarely conducive to building relationships or a meaningful social fabric of any kind, and because they’re profit-driven corporate entities. They’re not connected to physical communities, and they intend to get you hooked on parasocial relationships rather than real relaxation or camaraderie. My sense, or hope, is that we know this somewhere deep down. Perhaps most importantly, if we view phones as viable third spaces, we’re more likely to cede the real third spaces even further. Parks, libraries, and public places benefit everyone and build communities, rather than promoting isolation and silos. We cannot give those up, in fact we have to fight for them and intentionally build them.

Photo by Joshua Michaels on Unsplash

It’s not easy. When we sit in our cars, escaping briefly into a domain we have control over, we’re making the best of what we have. When we go to the bathroom on company time and dive into our phones, we’re making the best of what we have. But, crucially, doing the best we can as individuals is a world away from doing the best we can together. Collectively, we can shift our goals and aim infinitely higher. We can build a world we don’t want to escape from.

A friend, really more of an acquaintance but someone I’ve come to like and respect, has a small farm. He used to run a little dairy operation on it before he decided what he could pay people just wasn't enough given what little money he was making. So it’s not much of a working farm these days, and he’s decided that part of what he wants to do with the land is make it into a community garden. Alone he can’t do a whole lot, but he’s invited several of us over to help him and his wife begin to transform the space. It’s just step one, but in time we could collectively make a real community garden, a third space where no one has to pay to exist and where we break bread together or learn building and agricultural skills and more.

And we could learn one more thing. We could learn a little more about being communal rather than individualistic, about how there’s the potential for a greater freedom when we come together than when we’re stranded, apart. Some of this thinking might be new to you, some of it might not be. But I find that living in this way is new to just about all of us. We’ve all had glimpses of being part of some team, some religious institution, some unit larger than ourselves. But rarely is that unit about truly empowering the collective. Rarely is it intentionally geared towards coming together to build autonomy for all of us.

And that is what I think we want, as much as anything: autonomy. The simplest definition of the word is “the right or condition of self-government.” Those of us who grew up in the land of the free have been taught to crave autonomy, but we’ve also been taught that it’s an individual right, something we achieve in isolation. I appreciate the word autonomy because when you think about self-government for even an instant you see that while we should care about our individual freedoms, governance is something that is done collectively. I think, often, about positive liberty as opposed to negative liberty. While negative liberty is the absence of constraints and freedom from coercion or interference, positive liberty is what we have the freedom to do. It’s what we have the freedom to build and create, it’s the freedom we have to decide how society and life are set up. It is, in many ways, autonomy.

Alone our little scraps of freedom can often look like sitting in the car, on the phone. Maybe for the wealthy it looks like a mountain getaway, far from the world, but for most people it looks more and more constrained. Budgets get tighter, houses get smaller, and work gets more annoying. So we do what we can, we seek little escapes and bits and pieces of autonomy. But real freedom, real autonomy, can only be reached together. As a collective we can build gardens, bring down systems and create new ones, structure the world to be full of real freedom and joy. It’s possible, but only when we rise together.