Ah, the red light. A glowing reminder that somewhere, in some forgotten corner of the universe, someone still believes in fairness. And here you are, first in line, the unwitting protagonist of this grim little play, parked obediently on the crumbling edge of societal order while you wait for a green light that never seems to come. Meanwhile, the car next to you—a rust-patched sedan with more dents than dignity—decides to rewrite the script. With a roar of rebellion, questionable timing, and zero regard for common decency, it threads the needle through the intersection. No cops, no cameras, no cosmic comeuppance. Just a lonely honk trailing in their wake like the death rattle of an idea that once mattered.
As if on cue, a new contender rolls up beside you; their face a living meme of impotent rage, equal parts Greek tragedy and YouTube rant. They’ve seen the rule-breaker’s triumph and are now marinating in the existential vinegar of being the sucker who didn’t. You can feel their envy radiating through the glass, dense enough to sauté in. Because nothing stings more than watching someone slip through the traffic jam like a grease-soaked weasel while you’re still pinned under the suffocating weight of your own patience.
But this isn’t some random, one-off absurdity, is it? No, this is just Tuesday on the asphalt Thunderdome. Left-turn lanes have been hijacked by the impatient elite, transformed into expressways bypassing those of us queueing like fools. Turn signals? Quaint relics from a bygone era when “mutual respect” wasn’t a punchline. Pedestrians? Oh, you mean those fleshy bowling pins in humanity’s ongoing game of Frogger? And the traffic itself—it’s metastasizing. Pulsing, clogging, congealing with luxury behemoth over-compensators like cholesterol in the heart of a civilization choking on its own passive-aggressive tailgating.
And here’s where it gets fun: this is not chaos. It’s evolution, baby—emergent behavior in the wild. A textbook case of game theory meets modern malaise. Every rule broken, every boundary ignored chips away at the fragile trust holding this whole operation together, and by the time the light turns green, you’re hesitating—just for a split second. A blink of doubt about your fellow motorists. But that blink? That’s enough to ripple through the system like a butterfly wing causing tornados of road rage three blocks over. The machine slows. The frustration builds. Somewhere, some finance bro in a leased midlife-crisis-mobile decides he’s too important to wait. Red light? Optional. Consequences? For other people.
And you? Oh, you’re still here. White-knuckling the wheel, performing the quiet martyrdom of “doing the right thing” while seething with the kind of existential fury that fuels think pieces and bad poetry. But don’t kid yourself. That little voice whispering, What’s the point? That flicker of Screw this; I could have been halfway home already—that’s your moral firmware quietly rewriting itself. Not corrupted. Just… exhausted.
For now, you’ll stay the course. You’ll bite your lip, mutter about the decline of civilization, and try to convince yourself you’re the hero in this tragicomedy. But the thought lingers, doesn’t it? That tiny, treacherous question: What if? What if you weren’t the martyr? What if you weren’t the chump? What if, just once, you let the lines between “good” and “pragmatic” blur, because dammit—where’s the reward for your restraint? The seed lies dormant in the quiet corners of your resolve.
You’ll tell yourself it won’t happen. Not today. Maybe not ever. Because that’s how it ends, isn’t it? Not with a bang, but with a slow crescendo of internal combustion engines and the bitter, hissing sigh of collective exasperation. Civilizations don’t collapse overnight. They erode like coastlines: gradually, over centuries, with no single wave claiming full responsibility.
The light’s still red. But let’s be real—you’re already leaning on the gas.