Last Edited on 5/21

I’ve wanted to write about this forever. I think this is an original thought. I googled and couldn’t find anyone talk about this phenomenon. Actually, the closest I found was a research paper on driving styles and yellow lights.

What about yellow lights?

I have a theory that I as a person run into a statistically significant MORE amount of yellow lights while driving roads on this planet, compared to the average driver. It has made me upset in the past, to the point where I have been looking for someone to blame. Obviously, this is ridiculous because

  1. Traffic lights are what they are
  2. Yellow lights aren’t discriminatory

The psychological element

Really, it’s about personality and perspective (that’s not fun at all). I think with a specific amount of risk-tolerance and managed expectations, I have bamboozled myself into a narrative that “someone” out there is out to get me by making my journeys in a car take longer.

But what’s really going on here? With the help of my dear wife (who is understandably sick of my frustration when I’m driving), there’s an opportunity for introspection.

Oftentimes when I’m driving, I’m looking ahead at green lights and performing a calculation to determine if I’ll be able to make the green light. Most of the time the answer in my head is a there’s no chance I’m making that light. So if while driving I expect a specific outcome, then when that outcome does occur, I’ll have confirmation bias of “Oh another yellow light”. Occurrence after occurrence and year after year, it’s cemented into a narrative of I always get yellow lights

The lesson

In life, when anyone expects or focuses on a certain outcome, even if that’s not what is actually happening, the person will think that outcome obviously happened to them. This is why I suppose manifesting things in life are important, or why you often hear of sports heroes constantly “visualizing” their victory. While I’m not sure I think the mind is powerful to “make” things happen, I definitely think the mind can be an enormous impediment into what things are possible. Things like I am just a normal driver on the road and yellow lights happen, and I don’t have to stop every time.

gathering data (tangent thought)

If I really wanted to prove my theory, I suppose I would conduct an experiment where I kept track of all traffic lights I came upon, then recorded which ones were yellow which resulted in me stopping at the intersection, and then calculate the percentage.

I’d need some type of data set to compare it to to confirm that my percentage is higher than average.

I haven’t done this though, and I never really intend to since I have leaned more into the psychological element of this whole phenomenon.