Honestly avoiding people on the street improves my mental and physical health by reducing chronic cortisol. These fuckers stare at you and worse. A day of this and i am an anxious wreck.
It’s better to just get in your tanklet. Your little oasis. Home away from home.
That’s how i move nowadays from most point As to Bs. Music, AC, glasses. Perfect privacy. Calmness. Peace.
Kilograms of metal between you and the vicious, antagonistic reality of 2026 AD
It’s not just a car. It is an armor for the times like these.
lol, I can't tell if your comment is satire. Home of the brave, right? Where people looking at you is considered scary?
I'm a lot more scared of car crashes, since in most years they kill more people in the US than firearms do [1], and that's a pretty morbid statistic considering 58% of firearm deaths are suicides. [2] In other words, all those bullets flying at you as you walk down the street are less than half as deadly as driving in your vehicle.
I would encourage you to look in your local newspaper/news website and see how often someone loses their teenager in a car crash versus how often someone loses their teenager to violence on the street. I didn't lose any classmates to violence, but I lost at least one classmate to a car crash.
Here's another exercise: stand at a sidewalk at a traffic light intersection and count how many people in cars are actively on their phones.
The most statistically dangerous thing that happens to people walking is being hit by cars.
Somehow I doubt the Dutch are staring at each other with violent eyes and wishing they could cower away from the sidewalk into the safety of their RAM 1500 Crew Cabs. I struggle to imagine how that would happen: you can't even stare at people as you ride by them in the bike lanes in the Netherlands, the cyclists are going way too fast for that.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5642886/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7988561/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7670332/
[1] https://everytownresearch.org/graph/gun-death-vs-motor-vehic...
[2] https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2025/new-report-highlights-us-2...
I think a lot of it is that the US doesn't take a paternalistic approach to mental healthcare or addiction treatment, so there are a lot of junkies and people with psychosis out on the streets in many cities. My understanding is that in Europe these people are more likely to be receiving some kind of treatment and be living in supported housing of some kind, whether mandatory or not, where in a lot of the US they are ranting and raving on the streets and on public transit. But, it's their freedom to refuse shelter and to refuse treatment.
I don’t know why it feels like this but the modern world doesn’t feel like a safe place with sane people around us.
I would rather take my chances on the road than on the sidewalk or on a bus, completely exposed and defenseless. Like a girl from certain bus video.
You mentioned yourself that you can even be hit by a car. Many such cases lately of people driving car into groups of people.
This world is mad and i think you are much crazier than me. It’s one thing to feel it and do something, anything in response. It’s another to pretend like nothing is happening.
I won't literally ask where you live where you feel this way as I don't need you to reveal personal info about yourself, but I truly believe that if you feel this way and you don't live in some kind of extreme outlier crime-laden area, you might want to seriously think about talking to a therapist.
This level of fear you describe is not a healthy or reasonable way to live your life and is not a very typical sentiment. A professional can help you figure out where these feelings are coming from and what you can do to manage them.
Sure, there are crazy and violent people out there, I don't deny that.
I know I was being somewhat of an urbanist zealot in my last comment, but for real...regardless of whether you prefer suburbs and spending more time in your car or the city and spending more time on foot, this isn't a healthy way for you to see the world in either case.