I'll never forget my high school driver's education teacher. More than 40 years ago, he posed a simple question:
“Do you know what kind of gas mileage you get at a red light?”
When we pimply teenagers, startled from our torpor, shrugged, he delivered the punchline:
“Zero, because you're not moving.”
That stuck with me, though not totally for the reasons he intended.
I knew someone who lived his life flooring it toward every red light. Always in motion. Always reactive. Always convinced he was outsmarting time. He was penny-wise and pound-foolish, hoarding what little money he had while his house literally fell apart around him. Band-aid fixes on leaking pipes. Duct tape holding car bumpers together. Buckets placed under ceiling leaks. When he died, there was no money to speak of. Just a crumbling monument to avoidance that nobody else could decipher.
His workbench was awash in rusty, jury-rigged fixes turned permanent. His desk was buried under decades of I’ll deal with this later. A garden hose ran inexplicably through the garage. A swimming pool, decaying from neglect, became a breeding ground for mosquitoes when he grew tired of maintaining it.
He seemed to believe problems would solve themselves if only they were ignored long enough. He narrated life with himself at the center of every story, adopting other people’s passions just long enough to insert himself into their spotlight.
My therapist might call that immature narcissism. I just saw it as strange and mystifying, and later, as sad.
The highways are full of guys just like him, in their own way. The dude in the eighty-thousand-dollar Brodozer with the Thin Blue Line sticker or a cartoon Calvin peeing on a Chevy emblem, weaving through traffic like he’s rushing to perform an emergency transplant surgery, only to idle next to you at the red light, engine grumbling, peripherally glaring to spy who sees him.
That monstrous vehicle likely costs more than his annual income, but that doesn’t matter. It looks powerful. It sounds aggressive. And that's what counts.
These are people who confuse motion with progress and urgency with importance.
But here’s the thing: red lights are inevitable. The only real question is what condition you'll be in when you hit them.
Watching loved ones sort through that man’s mess…not financial ruin, but something arguably worse, a house full of half-solutions and decaying judgment, taught me something he never learned. Preparation isn’t pessimism. It's respect. It's the difference between leaving your family a roadmap or blithely leaving them an exhausting scavenger hunt.
And this isn’t just about one man, or even one generation. Entire institutions, and entire governments, have made a habit of flooring it toward red lights. Climate collapse. Healthcare insolvency. Infrastructure in decay. Education stripped to the studs. We see the red lights blinking from miles away. But instead of coasting into a solution, we double down on magical thinking and empty slogans.
The illusion of momentum is a powerful drug. Burn fuel. Burn time. Burn goodwill. Just don’t stop. Just don’t plan. Just don’t admit what everyone can already see through that cracked windshield you’ll fix later. Much later.
I think about that when I see those gleaming trucks gunning past me on the interstate. So focused on appearing powerful, they miss the reality that they are not getting anywhere faster. Just louder. Just costlier.
That man lived the same way in his own way. Just slower. Just quieter. Just as wasteful. Howard Hughes had money to insulate his madness; teams of handlers, expensive fixes, the luxury of eccentricity. This man just had buckets and duct tape.
The red light always wins.
The only choice we get is whether we coast up to it with a plan or slam into a brick wall at full speed, hoping someone else cleans up the wreckage.