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Edgar Allen Poe said with good reason that he was insane “with long intervals of horrible sanity.” Who, he might ask, wants to be sane! Sanity—assuming it’s based on your actual experience of the world—is a dreadful ambition. The entry level experience of life is, upon marginal reflection, an elaborate lie. If you look around you, you’ll notice a whole murder of sane crows flocking into the window panes of their delusions.
Let’s take some sage wisdom that a couple of old Homo neanderthalensis probably told us around some ancient fire: The caves you don’t live in have better feng shui than yours does. The tribe you’re not in wears a more modern style of animal skins. And the fields just out of view are greener than the ones you're in. This, I’m sure, had the same colorful turn of phrase in whatever proto-language neanderthalensis spoke.
Expecting greener grass seems the sure cry of insanity, especially if you've already been over there to check it out. But still, it looks greener, because grass from sidelong hides it’s necrotic rusts. If you trust your eyes, fuzzy fields from afar will always beckon emerald over the horizon.
Though generally considered healthy, the inability to see what the world looks like from a view outside of your own head has about a billion names in psychospeak: The fundamental attribution error, construal effects, outgroup homogeneity bias, the impact effect, the I’m-right-and-you’re-wrong effect (I made that one up, but let’s call it confirmation bias, which in and of itself bifurcates into a beauty pageant of psychological neologisms). It's bold but generic truth.
But what about that traffic lane you're in? The other lane will almost always appear to move faster than the lane you are in.
If this wasn't the reason why nations crumble, I wouldn't be mentioning it.
As my daughter pointed out, the other lane is actually faster. I agree with her. But most of the time, and on average for all of us, the lanes are moving at the same speed.
The reason it looks faster isn’t because you’re in the wrong lane. It’s because you’re in your own head.
From your fish-is-fish point of view, the world looks like this: At long last, the lane to your right stops moving and now, finally, the guy in front of you moves. So you move. Now you'll finally be able to make the appointment you’re about to be late for. And when you move, you drive five car lengths at the speed it takes to drive five car lengths. And then you stop. Crumbs. That was quick, you think. Only took about 20 seconds to do that. Now you’re sitting stationary in your overheating car again.
But wait, the lane to the right of you is moving again. Those bastards! And my god, they’re just driving and driving. You got to drive for 20 seconds and here they are, driving for like, what, a minute!
Do you pray to the wrong god?
It’s obviously time to take things into your own hands and cut someone in that lane off. They’ve had enough of the good life. And so you do cut someone off, in exactly the kind of maneuver that will surely be interpreted as a sign of your race-, age-, or gender-based ineptitude. But you're right, of course, because everyone behind the wheel is.
Almost immediately, your new lane stops so the guy behind you can get a good look at what people like you look like. And the lane you’ve just left begins a renewed and enduring journey. Not only that, but the guy behind you in the lane you just came from is clearly happy to have seen you go. Aaaaaagggh!
Okay, but wait. Back up. What happened?
Here are the real meat and potatoes of the thing: If two lanes are moving at the same rate, it will ALWAYS take longer for five cars to pass you than it will for you to pass five cars.
Just in case I’ve numbed your sense of numeracy too much with my rambling, the key point is not this: 5 = 5. The key point is that you drive 5 car lengths faster than 5 cars drive five car lengths. Indeed, you are one-fifth of the scorn in the other lane's many eyes.
The two lanes are moving at the same rate. When a car in a neighboring lane moves 5 cars forward, it has to wait on the car in front of him to get out of the way. The car in front of him has to wait on the car in front of her. Etcetera and repeat. So the last car in a group of five cars to pass you takes the time it takes to pass 5 cars PLUS the time it takes to wait on the other four antagonists to get out of the way.
You, in your narrow lane, you don’t experience all the slow inch worming of your lane as a series of passing cars. You just experience yourself moving forward five car lengths. But that neighboring lane, every time the guy next to you moves, you get passed again, and again, and again, and again, and again.
If he weren’t suffering an apoplectic fit of sanity, I’m sure a more modern but insane Ed Poe would joyfully doom us each to our own infinite torus of traffic with our own head behind every wheel.
For some light but super sane reading on the topic of traffic and delusion, Redelmeier and Tibshirani have worked out the insane details in Nature, 1999.
