This past weekend, we drove from Oklahoma City to Boulder to visit friends and go to a concert at Red Rocks. It was one of those quick, slightly unreasonable long-weekend trips where the math barely makes sense: around twenty hours of driving there and back for a few days away.
Driving that far for a short trip is tiring. There’s no way around that. By the end, your body starts to feel folded into the shape of the seat. Your shoulders get tight. Your mind gets strange. Gas stations begin to feel like sacred checkpoints. You start measuring life in exits, mile markers, bathroom breaks, and how many podcasts are left in the queue.
But despite the exhaustion, I’ve always enjoyed driving on trips.
There’s something about the long road that works for me. My mind has little tricks for dividing the trip into manageable sections. I don’t think in terms of the whole ten hours. That would be madness. I think in pieces. Get to the next town. Get to the next state line. Get to the next fuel stop. Finish this album. Make it through this stretch of nothing. The trip becomes less one giant task and more a string of small survivable realities.
And somewhere in the monotony, interesting thoughts start to surface.
A long drive is one of the few places where boredom still has room to breathe. There’s not much to do except watch the road, watch the cars, watch your own mind, and occasionally wonder why every gas station in western Kansas feels like it exists outside of time. The highway becomes a kind of accidental meditation. Not peaceful exactly, but repetitive enough that patterns begin to reveal themselves.
One thing I was reminded of on this particular trip is how much people drive with their egos.
This is not something you notice as clearly when you are actively driving in the usual way. When your foot is controlling the speed, you are part of the same unconscious dance as everyone else. You speed up, slow down, adjust, react, pass, get passed, and tell yourself you are simply driving normally.
But the second you turn on cruise control, the whole thing becomes obvious.
Cruise control turns you into a measuring device. You are no longer constantly adjusting your speed based on feeling, mood, impatience, pride, or the energy of the cars around you. You set the number and let the machine hold the intention. Suddenly, everyone else’s tiny fluctuations become visible.
I have a personal rule for setting cruise control on road trips. A safe cruising speed, for me, should match the first digit of the speed limit. If the speed limit is 70 or 75, I’ll set the cruise at 77 or 82. If it’s 55, I might set it at 60. If it’s 65, I might go 71. This usually puts me on the quicker side of traffic without pushing into the zone where I feel like I’m asking to get pulled over.
It’s not a perfect science, but it works for me. It keeps the drive efficient without turning it into a ticket-funded donation to whatever county I happen to be passing through.
But beyond avoiding speeding tickets, cruise control helps me avoid battles of the ego.
When your speed is fixed, you begin to notice something that feels almost universal: people speed up when you pass them. Not everyone. Not literally every car. But enough that it becomes impossible to ignore. You come up behind someone who is going slower than you. You move over to pass. Your cruise control is still set at the exact same speed. Nothing about your driving has changed. But as soon as you begin to overtake them, they accelerate.
One mile per hour. Two miles per hour. Sometimes more. Just enough to make the pass take longer. Just enough to reassert something. Just enough to make it clear that some hidden part of them has noticed they are being passed and does not like it.
I don’t think most people are consciously driving around trying to win a race. I don’t think they see another car passing and think, “Absolutely not. I must defeat this stranger from Oklahoma.” That would be insane, although also very funny. What I think happens is subtler and more human than that.
Being passed feels like being overtaken. And being overtaken feels, on some ancient animal level, like losing.
This is especially noticeable with men. And I want to be clear: I do not think this is because men are worse drivers. That’s not the point. The point is that men, myself included, often seem more vulnerable to the instinct to win. There is something deep in the wiring that wants to compete, even when there is no actual competition. Another car moving slightly faster becomes a challenge. Not consciously. Not rationally. But bodily.
The ego feels the pass before the mind explains it.
And I know this because before I started using cruise control regularly, I did the same thing.
I would be driving along at whatever speed felt right, and then someone would start to pass me. Without thinking about it, my foot would press down. Not dramatically. Not aggressively. Just a little. Enough to keep pace. Enough to resist being overtaken. Enough to preserve the illusion that I was still choosing my speed freely and independently.
But I wasn’t really choosing. I was reacting.
That is the part that interests me. The illusion is not simply that we are competing. The deeper illusion is that we believe our reactions are choices.
Cruise control exposed that for me. It revealed how often my “natural” driving was actually a series of tiny egoic negotiations with everyone around me. I wasn’t just deciding how fast to go. I was responding to being passed, being followed, being boxed in, being challenged, being inconvenienced, being seen. The road was full of mirrors, and I was adjusting myself according to every reflection.
That is why I use cruise control all the time now, even in town when I’m driving forty miles an hour through city streets.
It’s not because I’m trying to be overly precise or robotic. It’s because I don’t fully trust the unconscious foot. The foot has pride. The foot has impatience. The foot has old instincts. The foot believes it is defending my honor on a four-lane road next to a Walgreens.
Cruise control interrupts that.
It creates a small pocket of discipline between impulse and action. I set the speed when I am calm, and then I let that decision hold. The machine becomes a kind of guardrail against my own unnecessary reactions. There is something almost Zen about that: set the intention, stop negotiating, and let the road unfold.
Of course, the absurdity is that all of this is happening over one or two miles per hour. That’s what makes it so funny and so revealing. Nobody is winning anything. Nobody reaches their destination meaningfully faster because they refused to let a Toyota pass them outside Hays, Kansas. And yet the body reacts as if status itself is at stake.
That’s the human comedy in miniature. We are meaning-making animals trapped in nervous systems built for survival, status, and threat detection. Then we place those nervous systems inside metal boxes traveling eighty miles per hour and pretend everyone is making rational decisions.
The highway shows us otherwise.
It shows us how easily the ego turns neutral events into personal ones. A car passing is not an insult. A stranger driving faster is not a judgment. Someone else’s pace has nothing to do with your worth, intelligence, masculinity, agency, or place in the cosmic hierarchy. And yet, tap goes the gas pedal.
This pattern does not stay on the highway. It shows up everywhere. Someone gets a promotion, and we suddenly question our own career. Someone’s creative project takes off, and we feel behind. Someone loses weight, starts meditating, makes money, finds peace, changes beliefs, leaves the church, starts the business, writes the essay, or becomes some new version of themselves, and something in us speeds up. Not because we chose a new pace, but because we felt passed.
We call it motivation. Sometimes it is. There are moments when seeing someone else move forward awakens something true in us. It can remind us of what we want, what we’ve neglected, or what we’re capable of becoming. But sometimes what we call motivation is really just ego with better branding. Sometimes we are not being called forward by purpose. We are being pulled sideways by comparison.
The real question is whether our movement is chosen or reactive. Are we actually going where we want to go, at the pace that makes sense for our life? Or are we constantly adjusting ourselves because someone nearby seems to be moving faster?
That’s what cruise control teaches me. It is not just a driving tool. It is a mirror. It shows me the difference between intention and reaction, between movement and competition, between traveling and trying to win.
On that long drive back from Boulder, tired from the weekend and still carrying the echo of Red Rocks, I kept noticing it again and again. Cars would slow down, speed up, resist the pass, fall back, surge forward. Little unconscious dramas playing out across the plains. Nobody was announcing them. Nobody was naming them. They were just happening, quietly and constantly, one slight press of the pedal at a time.
And there I was, doing my best to stay at the speed I had chosen. Not because I am above the drama. I’m not. That’s exactly the point. I use cruise control because I know I am not above it. I know the instinct. I know the tiny internal flinch of being overtaken. I know the absurd little desire to win a race that does not exist.
So I set the number. I let the machine hold me steady. And for a while, at least, I practice letting people pass.