The Four Seconds I Don't Recognize as Mine

A car cut in front of me on the highway three weeks ago, close enough that my foot had moved before I’d decided anything with the part of me that talks. What happened next took about four seconds. I closed the gap he’d just opened, held a following distance close enough to read the sticker on his bumper, and stayed there through two lane changes before something let go and I dropped back, hands still shaking on the wheel. I don’t think of myself as someone who does that. For four seconds, I was.

What I remember most clearly isn’t the anger. It’s how little I was looking at. Not the mirrors. Not the car two lengths ahead that I’d normally be tracking without thinking about it. Just his bumper, filling most of the windshield, the way a target fills a scope. The psychologist J. A. Easterbrook described this narrowing in a 1959 paper on emotion and attention. As arousal rises, the range of cues a person can use shrinks, until only the most central and immediate ones are left. Driving calm, my attention is wide and distributed: mirrors, blind spots, whether the car two lanes over is drifting into mine. Angry, all of it closed down to one bumper.

Narrowed attention explains what was left in front of me to react to. It doesn’t explain who was doing the reacting. Daniel Kahneman, building on decades of work with Amos Tversky, popularized a name for the two modes doing the deciding here in a 2011 book: a fast, automatic System 1, and a slower, effortful System 2 that’s the closest thing in the mind to deliberate reasoning. System 2 is the part of me that knows, reliably and without needing to think hard about it, that following a stranger’s bumper at highway speed is a bad trade for whatever it’s supposed to accomplish. System 2 wasn’t consulted. Whatever decided to close that gap moved faster than any decision I remember making, closer to a reflex than a choice, and by the time the reasoning part of me had anything to say, my foot was already down on the gas.

Neither one explains why closing that gap, specifically, felt like the only response worth having, rather than braking, or laughing it off, or doing nothing at all. What makes this stranger than ordinary carelessness is that the choice wasn’t irrational in the way carelessness usually is. It was tuned to the one value left in the room for those four seconds, which was making him feel, immediately, some fraction of what I felt. The psychiatrist George Ainslie described the shape of this kind of collapse in a 1975 paper on impulsiveness, in what later work calls hyperbolic discounting: the pull of a reward rises steeply as it gets close, so steeply that a small payoff right now can outbid a much bigger one arriving only a little later. Ainslie wasn’t writing about anger. But anger is where I’ve felt that curve at its steepest. My considered preference, the one I’d give you in any calmer minute of my life, is not to risk a collision to make a stranger briefly uncomfortable. For four seconds, that preference wasn’t available to be consulted. Only the near one was.

Yuqi Bai’s essay on De Quincey and Keith Richards uses Harry Frankfurt’s 1971 distinction between a first-order desire, wanting something directly, and a second-order desire, wanting to be the kind of person who wants it, to describe two of Frankfurt’s most quoted cases: an addict who wants to quit and keeps losing that fight, and one who doesn’t want to quit at all. What happened to me for those four seconds fits neither. I wasn’t struggling against the desire to close that gap, the way the first addict struggles. I certainly wasn’t endorsing it, the way the second one does. The question of which desire should win never came up at all. Frankfurt has a name for that condition, too, less quoted than the other two: a wanton, someone with no operative second-order desire in the moment, who isn’t unfree in the tragic sense of losing an internal fight, because there’s no fight, no committee in session, nobody home to vote either way. He even describes a wanton addict, behaviorally identical to his other two, who simply never asks the question his more famous addicts can’t stop asking.

Frankfurt meant that as a description of a kind of being, not a kind of moment, something closer to what a small child or an animal is, permanently, rather than what a person becomes for four seconds on a highway. That’s what actually unsettles me about it. I am not, the rest of my life, a wanton. I have opinions about which of my desires should govern me, I act on them, I write essays about it. For four seconds, none of that machinery was running, not broken, not overruled, just absent, the way it’s absent in a being that never had it to begin with. I’ve told myself since that the four seconds ended because I came back to myself, my own System 2 fighting its way back to the wheel, the committee reconvening. But a committee that wasn’t in session can’t have fought its way back into one; it can only have started meeting again, on its own schedule, for reasons that had nothing to do with anything I did. I want to believe the person is the real one and the wanton was the exception. I have no way to check that against what happened in my own head, and I’m not sure four seconds is long enough for anyone, including Frankfurt, to say which one of us was driving.