Number 11   

The Psychological Impact of NOT Owning a Car

Relax, I won’t be psychologically analyzing our car ownership behavior, I’d need a longer blog to do that.  Since this is the first time in both our lives Roger and I have not owned a car, it has taken some getting used to it.  It has evoked an inner reaction to this new phenomenon…..  I’ll call it Car Separation Anxiety or C.S.A. for short. Remember you heard it here first.

We were unaware of how much we took for granted owning a car. As Americans, we often consider our cars as extensions of our personalities.  Roger and I value comfort and efficiency, so we have always preferred a certain level of luxury in our vehicles, a level of “car pride” it evoked.  Coming to Costa Rica we made a conscious decision to live in the city and not own a car.  As I pointed out in an earlier blog, it takes a great deal of effort to figure out how to get from point A to point B in Costa Rica.  Yesterday, we wanted to go to an Art Show in a suburb about 4 miles away from where we live.  We ended up taking 2 buses and a taxi to get there.  Although the trip back was 1 bus ride away….hummm.  

So here we are in a new country that totally values car ownership and makes it difficult to use mass transit.  No wonder Roger and I often have conversations about “should we buy a car?”  We have survived a month without a car.  I won’t say that it’s been “great”.  There are pros and cons to our decision.  The lower costs are good, whereas the inconvenience is bad. I could write a long list of pros and cons, but, we finally concluded that rational calculations of owning a car plays almost no justification in our decisions.

In the US, we used to have “conversations about the “right” way to get somewhere.  Now we are just happy to get where we originally wanted to go.  Will we ever buy a car in Costa Rica?  Well as they say “never say never”.  For now, we are taking each day as a challenge to recover from our C.S.A.  Maybe I should look into starting a 12 step program………