Can Mean Drivers Be Good People?

I did some bad things when I was young, some of which I am still too ashamed to share publicly. When it came to driving, I was not always responsible or courteous. I sped, I crashed, I cut people off, I tailgated, and on one rare occasion I even ended up in a fight with another driver. What do you call someone who behaves like that? It is not quite a bad driver, because bad often implies incompetence, and a person can be perfectly competent and still behave terribly on the road. So the better label is a mean driver. And that is exactly what I was.

Why was I like this? You could explain it in a few different ways. A biologist might point to the hormonal storm that teenagers live in. A sociologist might focus on cultural influences, from the action movies and racing games I grew up with to the broader norms around driving in the Greater Toronto Area. A psychologist might trace it back to the anger I carried toward my mother and toward others I believed had wronged me. Each of those explanations probably gets at something real. Yet as I look back, the reasons matter less to me than the way I used to interpret this behaviour, and how that interpretation has changed.

Despite all of this, I still thought of myself as a good person, and most people probably would have described me that way. I was kind in most contexts. I worked hard. I did well in school. I helped around the house. I volunteered. I gave generously of my time, money, and attention to friends and family. I held values that were handed down by parents who lived them, by teachers who reinforced them, and by a community that supported them. So I told myself that a few ugly moments on the road did not define me. They were exceptions. They did not cancel out everything else. To avoid being a hypocrite, I extended the same courtesy to others. When I saw someone driving aggressively, I never assumed they were a bad person.

For a long time, that way of thinking made sense to me. People make mistakes. Good people slip. Good people lose their temper. But over time my view shifted. It happened slowly at first, and eventually it settled in. I began to see that the way someone behaves in small, low-stakes situations reveals who they really are. Driving is one of those situations. No one is watching. No one is judging. Your behaviour is shaped entirely by your own impulses and habits. If kindness shows up there, it is genuine. If cruelty shows up there, that matters too.

This made me rethink what goodness actually means. I used to believe that goodness could be divided into compartments. You could be kind here, harsh there, and still qualify as a good person overall. But the more I reflected on it, the more this view felt incomplete. It treated goodness like a loose collection of traits, as if someone could be generous on Monday, honest on Tuesday, considerate on Wednesday, and then hostile behind the wheel on Thursday without those contradictions affecting the whole. That picture no longer made sense to me.

I started thinking about integrity, both the moral kind and the structural kind. When we say a building has structural integrity, we mean it holds together as a unified whole. It does not collapse when pressure is applied in the wrong place. Its strength is consistent throughout. Moral integrity works the same way. It is not enough to have a few strong pillars if the rest of the structure is weak. A crack is still part of the building, just like a mean moment is still part of the person. If your character gives way under minor pressure, that weakness is real no matter how admirable you might be elsewhere.

Realising this changed the way I drive today. I cannot imagine being a mean driver now. I still enjoy the feeling of a fast car and I sometimes drive quickly when I believe it does not put anyone at risk, but my attitude toward others on the road is entirely different. I drive patiently. I leave space. I let people in. When someone cuts me off, I do not get angry. Their behaviour reflects their state of mind, not mine. Driving feels quieter now. It reflects who I have become rather than who I once was.

This way of thinking brought me closer to the views of Plato and Aristotle. Both believed that virtue is not something you turn on and off. It is a stable part of a person’s character, built through repeated action until it becomes second nature. A virtuous person behaves consistently because their inner orientation is steady. Aristotle built his entire moral picture on this idea. Plato went even further. For him, goodness is a harmony of the soul, a kind of order in which each part supports the whole. I find myself aligned with them. Goodness is not a performance. It is something unified.

There is another view, one that is much more forgiving. Many people believe that human beings are inconsistent, that behaviour shifts with circumstances, and that we should not judge a person’s entire character based on isolated moments. I understand this position, but I think it describes what people often are, not what they ought to be. It is a psychological explanation, not a moral one. It explains inconsistency, but it does not turn inconsistency into a virtue. It helps us understand weakness, but it does not set a standard worth aiming for.

This leads to an uncomfortable conclusion. If mean behaviour on the road reflects a lack of integrity, and if our roads are filled with this behaviour, then many people are not as good as they believe themselves to be. The answer is not to give up on people. The answer is to try harder ourselves. Raise yourself to a higher standard. Practise kindness even when it feels unnecessary. Be patient when no one sees it. Be loving when there is nothing to gain. Goodness grows slowly through repetition and through small acts that shape your character over time. If you want integrity, build it through the moments that seem too small to count, because those are the ones that show who you are.

This is why I no longer believe that I was a good person who occasionally behaved badly behind the wheel. Those moments revealed something real about me, something I needed to face. And if I want to claim goodness now, it cannot be based only on the best version of myself. It has to include the person I am when the stakes are low and the mask is off.

What I learned on the road carries into the rest of my life. The small moments matter. How we behave there slowly turns into who we are. I try to keep that in mind now.