I do wear my seat belt. I don’t have a choice. It’s illegal not to. And you need to not worry so dang much. The laws are carpet bomb laws. When dealing with hundreds of millions of people, it saves lives. But you personally, it has no effect except you trying to convince me that an SUV can pop out from behind a bush any second now and murder me if it sees me not wearing a seat belt.

But you are stroking out in fear and don’t know it. There is a downside. What people back in the time before mass shootings and road rage called fender benders, you consider proof that you need to be prepared for death every time you get behind the wheel. If you drive like a grandma, the most that is going to happen to you is someone accidentally bumping into your car occasionally.

You’re proving my point. You’re worried about something that’s just not going to happen to you. I can safely make a $500 bet with 4,000 people in the US that if they don’t wear their seat belt that they will be alive a year from now and be $1,999,500 richer. It’s not psychologically healthy to constantly worry about this, strapped into a bucket seat by a 3 point safety harness, like you’re an astronaut riding an SLS rocket to the Moon when you’re only driving down the road to buy a gallon of milk.

And what I mean by saying that people shouldn’t wear seat belts unless they need to, does not mean go fumbling for your seat belt in the middle of an emergency situation. It means when you know you are about to be in a dangerous situation that requires one, like riding with someone who you know is a horrible driver. Or that famous scene in Bullitt where Bullitt and the villains buckle up before their big car chase, jumping the hills of San Francisco. Today we buckle up like we’re about to get into a wild car chase when we’re just going around the corner to McDonald’s. That’s making everyone neurotic.

People shouldn’t wear seat belts unless they need to. Constantly being hypervigilant, prepared for the worst case scenario, thinking you have zero control over whether you get in a deadly accident is bad for the psychological health of our society.

Before seat belt laws there wasn’t even a word for road rage. It didn’t exist because when someone accidentally swerved into your lane or cut you off it didn’t feel like attempted murder.

In 1971, it was hold me close tiny dancer and count the lights on the highway. Today it’s stay over there tiny dancer and stay strapped into your bucket seat just on the off chance we get into a horrible accident. We’re driving ourselves batty with this kind of paranoia.