Honk your horn
After a particularly grueling and frustrating week at work, I was driving home from picking up my daughter from school, and there were several different honking exchanges at this one stoplight. This is Pittsburgh, which is more midwest than east coast, so I rarely hear anyone honk, and almost never the sustained angry honks I was hearing. I thought, "They must be having the kind of week I'm having."
A bit later, I found myself alone on the road, no other cars visible either way. I thought, maybe I could honk. So I did. A nice long one. And it felt very good. I did it again a bit later. Still cathartic. I finally had to stop because my 10 year old was going to die of embarrassment.
So that's my recommendation. Get out there and let out a big honk. Not at anyone, not road rage, just let loose a little.
What are your other outlets for relieving stress?
Same vein, but sometimes... Just scream. It's a privilege to live far enough away from other people that it's not going to freak out any neighbors. But a good yell is cathartic!
Car screaming is great if the home will stress out the neighbors. Even better if it's raining
Oh, can't believe I forgot about car screaming! Also a technique I've used to wake myself up on long and/or late drives. It was a staple when I worked night shift.
A good car scream when it's raining outside - idk why the rain just really helps my vibe especially if it's a car sob and scream - is so cathartic.
Just about the only thing I miss about working in kitchens is going to the walk-in and just cursing and screaming my head off. Turns out all that insulation is good for more than just keeping food cold. Sometimes I’d “forget” to grab something so I could go right back and get another little outburst in.
They have handles on the inside right? And there's some kind of alarm or lock in lock out policy? I have an irrational fear of being locked inside a walk in, having worked with teenagers in a kitchen before
...any walk-in cooler made since - well, decades at least, don't know the exact date - will have an emergency release to open the door from inside, although sometimes it's not obvious: look for a large palm-sized knob near the latch (sometimes they even glow in the dark) which you can unscrew to release the entire latch mechanism, although mind that it's intended only for emergency use and not designed for easy reassembly afterward...
(it literally unbolts the latch assembly from the exterior wall, so you can push the still-latched door open from inside the cooler, but it's a twist-knob not designed for operation by disabled occupants nor for quick-release in the event of an emergency)
This comment is soothing an ancient paranoia. Thank you :)
One of my favorite youtube skits of all time:
A Pillow To Scream Into
So many little gags, true comedy.
Digression: Interestingly, linkedin flatly refused to return search results for Timothy. More googling led me to this reddit thread . If I ever get to name some pets, Tomothy and Jedward are going to be top of my list.
...i decided to unload a rage-punch into a solid-core door yesterday, since i figured it was stout-enough not to sustain any damage; turns out i was right!..
(broke my hand, though, so now i'm living left-handed for the next six weeks until it heals enough to remove the splint)
I lived in the woods growing up, and my brother and I were going wild on a windy day and just literally screaming at the ground. A neighbor came running through the woods to make sure everyone was okay. It was funny as a kid, but my parents were pretty embarrassed.
Oh no a couple kids alone screaming in the woods lol your poor neighbour and parents hahaha
Always reminded of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia
I read a book a while ago (The End of the World Running Club - it was fine) that had a character who yelled at the sun every day, saying something like
For whatever reason, that stuck with me and I sometimes yell at the sun if I’m on the bike path by myself on my commute.
Someone once suggested in a YT video that there should be an easily reachable little courtesy honk button, just one or two short bips rather than beeps, maybe to let the distracted person ahead know that the light is green or to thank them for letting you pass.
bip
bibbip
I remember this video and have thought about it pretty much weekly for the last 8 or so years since I saw it. I think having additional means of communication between cars would be a net positive. I have thought it would be nice to have a little electronic message board that could display little messages like "thanks for letting me pass!" would be fun but I also know that immediately the worst things would be written on it.
Driving around is pretty much the only time a social credit score starts to make sense to me though...
I had a friend who proposed a system with dart guns that fired little markers made of a fast setting, unbreakable epoxy. Each driver is given a limited number, and if someone does something they don't like, they shoot one and it's permanently affixed to the offending car. Visual social credit!
With screens in everyone's cars now, it should be feasible to laser tag a bad driver, or tell your car to tag the one in front even if the human can't see the license plate. Then your dash will display everyone's scores like it's a video game. Everyone can give maybe 5 kudos points per 100km driven, and make complaints about 2?
Yeah, I mean that's so logical and practical. But it doesn't get me a paintball turret on my car!
In all seriousness, computer vision is good enough and AI speech interaction is good enough that you could make a dash cam where you can say "tag the last thirty seconds of the grey Mazda" and it is uploaded to a public shaming site that correlates submissions based on license plate. Privacy nightmare, but ring cameras caught on, so ... I should not give the Bez any more ideas.
It's coming, I'm tell you. Maybe the best way to steer this is to do an ethical version ourselves.
There are millions of cars on the road! North Americans spend X billions of dollars a year on driving related activities! Dashcam footage and ring can footage drive insane traffic! If we can capture just 1% of the market blah blah blah I'm here to ask for $5m in exchange for 10% of my company. Invest today before Bezos Zuckerbergs it up!
While yours is the more practical, realistic solution, I think there's something so distinctly American in the solution of "gun violence but maybe less lethal" that I just really enjoy.
I also agree that this is coming at some point anyway. I'm sure insurance companies are salivating at the opportunity to have real-time premiums and I'm sure they were unhappy with the reallocation of the radio wave frequency reassignment in 2020. Luckily for us consumers, manufacturers never really got behind vehicle-to-vehicle/everything anyway so we'll just use whatever Elon Bezucks comes up with to both assign a social credit score and remove what little privacy we have remaining.
Being in nature and interacting with the natural world are the best stress relievers for me. Gardening, harvesting and processing firewood, cuddling my dog, going for a walk in the woods.
Yeah I was skeptical until I tried:
Donning good protective gear
Chainsaw + random pieces of stumps
It's funny but it's true!
Even if you're chainsawing with a purpose, it's a fairly mindless, repetitive task. Activating that default mode network in your brain is so good for you and something we don't get enough of.
(In Peter Brin's later Uplift books there are POV characters who are sentient chimpanzees, the product of accelerated directed evolution. When facing problems they sometimes regret that humans have given them sentience. I feel like this a lot - sentience is the problem, it sucks to be aware of things, and that's why meditation and similar (and alcohol and some drugs) can be so great.)
You also get to feel good about using a green source of fuel to heat your home, as long as you're sourcing the firewood locally from naturally-dead trees.
:D oh for sure. See also long handled axe vs deadwood, and clippers vs blackberry bush. Or even simply yeeting rocks as far as possible. Yesterday I got to yeet mackerel heads at the ocean and that was nice. Saw crabs, 1 big lobster and 1 mink.
Something about going ape amongst greenery fixes things for me. It's like the active version of going out to touch grass.
Similar, but I just jump in my car and drive. Pick a direction and go. No GPS directions. Just drive and listen to my favourite music. I have found fun and random places doing that. I really enjoy driving without time constraints (like needing to be at work for a certain time) so I find it does a good job of relaxing me.
I suppose I should add that I have an EV that I really enjoy driving and costs very little to drive.
I used to drive a Saturn which, instead of a giant mashable central steering wheel horn, had two small horn buttons on either side of the wheel. Deeply unsatisfying.
Hah, seen that in an opel astra probably old enough to be a us senator, too. I get the feeling, it feels very different & unsatisfying
I seem to recall my Acura Integras having those, too. I think it was a consequence of manufacturers not yet having figured out how to incorporate horn buttons into steering wheels with airbags.
Oh shit, my old 1999/2000ish (first gen anyway) CRV had that! Man I miss that car sometimes.
The Dodge Spirit had those too. And they were clicky, like chiclet keyboards.
Where I live there is a short tunnel that connects our town to the adjacent one. When I was growing up we'd come down to where I live now for vacation and we all knew that tunnel as "the honking tunnel". When you drive through it people, not everyone mind you, will tap out different honks on their horns. As a kid I adored it and as an adult I still get a huge smile while going through and toot tooting my horn.
The funniest part is that half of our friends hate that people honk their horns and half love it! There is no middle ground. What we've noticed is that if you grew up in the area and experienced it as a child, then you're definitely in the "love it" camp. If not, more than likely you fall into the hate it camp. It's very funny.
Toot toot, toot toot toot...
I don't live in your area and I already hate this tunnel 0..0 I can feel my heart racing at the thought of having to approach this enclosed space with an echo, and that all the other cars will be making noise nearly 100% of the time.....I would go out of my way to detour around something like this.
But I also see how it's super fun for others to look forward to different sounds and interesting patterns every time
That’s totally fair. Unfortunately (for the folks who hate it) I live on a little peninsula and there are only 2 roads to get into the town and that tunnel is mandatory if you’re coming in from the north. It’s kind of unavoidable…
I'm firmly in the "love it" camp, although I'm very sympathetic to the "hate it" crowd. But I also loved asking truckers to sound their horns when doing road trips as a kid. I'd frantically wave up at them, and if they saw me (and/or my sibling, also frantically flailing), they'd sometimes give us a few hoooooonks, which always made us cheer.
LOL, the horn in my truck is so old and barely functional that it sounded like a meek little squeek. I laughed my ass off, definately improved my mood. Thanks for the suggestion.
Related - every time I hear someone honk in my city I look and see what they’re honking at and it’s never justified (except when buses blare at people driving illegally in the bus lane). The few times I’ve been driving and might have needed to honk it was actually safer to focus on the road and keep both hands on the wheel for steering. I think car horns are almost exclusively abused and rarely see proper use in improving safety. I wish there was a way to improve this ratio.
Honking culture varies so widely from place to place, I hesitate to make a universal statement. Maybe a good system would be: the first N honks are free, then they are taxed at a rate that increases the more you go above N, where N is set based on GPS at some regional average based on traffic density.
Often by the time a bystander looks after hearing a honk, the instigating offense is already resolved. The lane drift is corrected, the unsafe merge/cut-off complete, everyone stopped following an abrupt stop, whatever, so it can look at that point like just an impatient asshole honking.