on
Random Psychology
Driving Reflections
My dad passed away back in May, so my life has been changing quite a bit because I lived with him and I used to hang out with him quite a lot despite us not having too many common interests aside from food.
One big change is that I finally learned how to drive a car, because my sister pushed me to learn to drive the car my dad left behind. I used to drive a motorbike during my college years, but I mostly drove just to go to the university and back. I did drive for some other reasons occasionally, like going to job interviews during my final year at university. But most of the routes were the same routes I mindlessly followed every time.
Smartphones were still a relatively luxurious thing back then, so even if Waze was big back then for street navigation, I didn’t really use it. Also, I was on a motorbike and I don’t think phone holders for motorbikes were common back then. It is very common now since GrabBike and Gojek drivers use it for monitoring orders and navigating through the street, but I haven’t been driving motorbikes on the road for more than ten years already and I definitely never got a chance to drive a motorbike with a phone holder attached to it.
Anyway, it has been almost three months since the first time I drove a car. I got my license and it has been about a month since I started driving myself around the city. When I go out on a drive and review my driving performance afterwards, I sometimes compare my on-the-road decisions with what I think a better driver would do. This is a fairly common habit for me when doing many things.
One of the better drivers I regularly use as a reference is my dad. He has been driving since probably the late 1970s or early 1980s, and I had watched him drive since I was a toddler.
Back when I was in middle school and high school, sometimes he took me to the same places repeatedly over the period spanning a few weeks or months. He always scolded me for not memorizing the routes we had passed, since he thought it was an important skill to learn in life. I didn’t care enough to memorize the routes since I had no business going to those places when he wasn’t around.
Now that I drive, and a lot of the time I need to go somewhere I don’t go to very often, I’m very reliant on navigation apps. There are of course a few places in the city I already got the routes memorized. But even when I go there, I still choose to use my navigation app of choice because it gives me flexibility if the route is somehow not feasible for me at the time and I must find an alternative route.
My dad never really used navigation apps when driving. I think the primary reason is that he wasn’t technologically savvy especially with computers and increasingly software-driven devices like smartphones. I think that is also a major reason that when we finally bought our own family car in early 2020s after his retirement (he was given a company-owned car to drive prior to that), he chose a used early 2010s manual transmission car with very few visible electronics in it aside from a radio and CD player. He didn’t really like using automatic transmissions. He probably felt like automatic transmission is basically cheating, since we don’t need to learn proper clutchwork and gear shifts with it.
While I initially learned to drive so I could drive that car, our family later decided to sell the car and replace it with something safer for someone at my level of experience to drive with the driving conditions around the areas I might need to visit later. The car we considered safer should at least have automatic transmission to remove the burden of clutchwork and the risk of the engine stalling at inconvenient moments, and with a parking camera to compensate for my lack of sense for measuring distance towards objects behind the car (which should get better with experience, but without a proper parking camera probably I’d end up hitting a few objects and paying for damages along the way).
So yeah, in the end all my driving setup is different from my dad’s. And whenever I review my driving performance and compare it to his, that got me thinking that what I saw as his old-school rigid mindset was probably something he originally learned for something else but then applied for an entirely different context.
He seemed to never be very explorative with new routes, except if he happened to have gone through that route before when driving with someone else who already knew the route. He typically remembered several shorter routes to certain places or landmarks, then combined it all into one longer route to somewhere farther. And while that was the best strategy before the availability of tools like Google Maps, he basically kept approaching it the same way even after he had access to those tools because he never really bothered to learn how to use those tools.
But the reason he never learned to use the tools might also follow the same logic as why he always followed the exact same route despite it probably not being the most efficient route for him to follow (he sometimes switched routes, but always to another familiar one as he primarily chose by familiarity).
Realistically, there should be a lot more possible routes to reach where he wanted to go and some of those routes should be better, but he simply never explored those options yet because the cost of exploration back when he was younger was way more expensive. Back then, he needed to drive through all those route variations in order to know the routes and expected traffic characteristics for each route. Following that logic, he might have seen learning how to use new technologies to be an unnecessarily costly effort when he could just repeat what he already knew for the same result.
I can simply simulate various routes on Google Maps and then decide which one I want to follow. The exploration cost is very cheap for me, even if I’m totally unfamiliar with the areas shown in the routes.
So even if our driving setups are so different, I think by doing the exact same activity he used to do throughout his life (which is driving), I can start to appreciate my dad’s attitude which I used to consider to be unnecessarily rigid back when he was still around.
Given how much he liked to drive and how he had developed his own strong preferences regarding cars and routes, now I started to think that the rigidity I felt was probably partly something he learned from driving and he simply applied it to many other contexts.