The part of adulthood I haven’t subscribed to

I have a confession. I don’t tell people this right away when I meet them. I didn’t tell anyone I work with until I’d spent a couple weeks in the office and decided it was a safe space. I told my barber the other day, but there’s something about that swivel chair that makes me cough up my deepest secrets before I can stop myself.

Here it is: I don’t own a car.

I don’t have plans to own a car. I’m not saving up for a car, I’m not waiting for the right time to buy a car, none of that noise.

Now, plenty of you out there who live on the East Coast or in Chicago probably don’t think this is that big a deal. You’re likely thinking, “Who needs a car when our city invested millions of dollars into a dedicated public transportation system decades before we were born?”

You train riders and your goddamn privilege.

The city I live in doesn’t give a rat’s ass about public transportation. Austin is a city made for cars, or rather, cars are prerequisite for Austin to work as a city. I moved down here a few months ago and quickly realized that not only is everything bigger in Texas, but everything is also farther apart. The highways are four lanes wide, and there’s another four lanes on either side for people who want to get where they’re going quickly but can’t quite commit to the highway life.

I was told that I would need a car in this city and now I see what people were talking about. However, I’m still going to be a stubborn little brat about it for reasons that I will now explain.

For starters, when I was a teenager I drove like a blind gorilla raised by Ricky Bobby. I got in three car accidents my senior year and one of them involved a parked car. I also get nailed with speeding tickets like nobody’s business. I’ve paid over $500 to various Midwestern states in the past couple years because of my penchant for hanging out in the fast lane. For these reasons and also because I’m a 23 year old male, the good folks at Progressive want me to pay $350 a month for car insurance. I could do that…or I could use that money to buy a new Playstation 4 every month for the rest of the year until all my furniture is made of used PS4 parts.

Secondly, I would end up leaving my car in my apartment’s parking garage for 8 hours a day Monday through Friday. It’s a 15 minute bus ride to my office, and although I don’t enjoy spending too much time with the weirdos who lurk on Austin Public Transit, it’s only 15 minutes. I’m sure that if anyone out there looked into it they could take the bus to work just as easily. Don’t even come at me with the whole stigma about riding a bus either. People ride trains and subways and those things are glorified rat nests. I hardly ever see rats on the bus and when I do the bus driver handles the situation like a pro.

My third and final reason for not buying a car is because I already have a girlfriend. I convinced her to date me when I was driving my dad’s car around my college campus and she’s too committed to turn back now. If you’re looking for a girlfriend, I can’t recommend using my tried and true method of courtship. I’m not sure how the dating scene has changed since I was a young stud on the market, but back in the day you needed a car to go on dates, take girls home at night, and generally appear cool to the fairer sex. If my lady ever leaves me then you might find me at your local car dealership, asking which one of these cars carries the lowest insurance premiums.

I figure I save about $600 a month by not owning a car. I don’t do anything particularly cool with all that extra money, but $600 makes a big difference when it comes time to pay rent. Hell, in Austin that’s the difference between a 1 BR apartment and a 1BR apartment with a walk-in closet. Join the revolution folks, just don’t tell anyone about your decision because people take pity on you when they find out you don’t own a car. That’s why I only tell strangers on the internet and my barber.