Why I Walk Two Miles to Avoid Taking the Bus

How a confusing bus ride in Germany revealed my lifelong habit of walking to escape public awkwardness.

Embarrassment is the price of admission for a life fully lived.” — Susan David

Arun Kumar

The morning air in Bonn was brisk enough to justify a coat, but not cold enough to excuse the sudden warmth rising up the back of my neck.

I was standing near the front of a crowded bus, suspended in a peculiar mental state known only to foreigners. In my right hand, I held a crumpled five-euro note, extended like a peace offering toward the bus driver who looked through me with the clinical indifference reserved for tourist. With a slow, practiced flick of his wrist, he pointed toward the back of the bus. No words. None were deemed necessary. Whether he spoke English or simply preferred the modest power of withholding it, the message was clear: Move along and go the ticket machine at the back.

I turned and began the unsteady trek down the aisle. The bus lurched forward, forcing me into a precarious dance, bracing against handrails to avoid tumbling into the lap of some unsuspecting commuter reading the morning news. When I finally reached the ticket machine, another trial began.

The interface stared back at me in German, a language whose long, compound nouns look remarkably official. I fumbled for the language toggle, hyper-aware of the quiet, captive audience around me. When English finally appeared, it brought no relief — only a bewildering array of transit options. Single journey? Short trip? City zone? Day pass?

I tapped the screen, tapped it again, waved my credit card against the reader, and prayed for the gentle hum of a printing ticket rather than the harsh beep of rejection.

                                                           *  *  * 

If the distance between my hotel and a meeting is two miles or less, I will almost always choose to walk. It takes about forty-five minutes; a duration I have spent years rationalizing. It’s good for my health, I would tell myself. It offers time for contemplation.

Never mind that half of these walks take place along six-lane arterial roads, where “contemplation” consists primarily of walking through exhaust fumes and listening to truck horns. The narrative was comforting because it framed my choice as intentional, healthy, and high-minded.

It was only there in Germany, balanced on one foot against the momentum of a lurching bus, that the self-deception fell away and clarity emerged.

I was not walking for fitness. I was walking to escape stage fright.

Taking a bus in an unfamiliar city is not merely transportation; it is an unexpected, unscripted five-minute performance in front of an audience. You step onto a brightly lit stage, surrounded by seated spectators. Every hesitation — searching for the machine, staring in bafflement at the fare structure — becomes a spotlight.

                                                           *  *  * 

A while back, I wrote about this same phenomenon: the extraordinary lengths we go to in order to avoid public embarrassment. At the time, I wondered if this sensitivity is rooted in something far older.

In early human history, falling out of favor with the group was rarely a minor inconvenience — it was a threat to survival. To be noticed for the wrong reasons was to risk isolation. Perhaps our nervous systems still carry that primal memory, mistaking the quiet scrutiny of morning commuters for the quiet judgment of the tribe. The pulse spikes not because the ticket machine is complex (which it is), but because our biology still reads public awkwardness as a matter of life and death.

Go figure.

                                                           *  *  * 

Yet, the irony of stage fright is also how quickly the stage dissolves.

On my second morning in Bonn, I stepped through the bus doors with a different rhythm. I walked straight to the machine, swiped the card without looking for the English toggle, retrieved the ticket, and slid into an empty seat near the window. The audience hadn’t changed, but the feeling of being in spotlight was gone. I was no longer an actor in a play; I was just another passenger watching the morning traffic on streets of Bonn, on my way to a meeting.

Ciao, and thanks for reading.

 

My Mother's Script

I arrived on a sunny afternoon
from a land far away,

just as winter folded its quilts
to hibernate through summer.

The first days were pure joy—
tracing the new lines
on our aging faces.

Days marched to the scent
of her cooking
drifting into the night.

Then the halfway mark
quietly passed.

I caught her watching me
with forlorn eyes—

trying to frame me
in the folds of her mind
to hold me close.

On the final night,
a heavy silence fell.

Her vacant gaze held an emptiness
that would stretch across the ocean
until I returned.

This was her script—
replayed year after year
on her expectant face.

 

Why I Check My View Count in the Shadow of Mortality

On Terror Management Theory, evolutionary hardwiring, and the quiet obsession with digital echoes in retirement.

Deep down, I know an article’s impression score will not survive my death or matter when I am gone—for when I leave, I leave. Yet tracking the metric offers a momentary, artificial sense of expansion, significance, and presence while I am here.

Arun Kumar

We discussed how our ability to stitch together an extended temporal window, while an evolutionary advantage, also gave us an awareness of our own mortality. Further, although we never personally experience our own death, we do observe that all biological life forms eventually come to an end. These observations lead us to extrapolate that our own life will inevitably end as well, grounding the awareness of mortality in observed fact.

Somewhere deep inside, we also know that all the baggage and possessions we carry through life are ultimately left behind. Yet so much of how we live directly contradicts this awareness of mortality and its sweeping implications. The friction generated by the contradiction between what mortality means and how we carry ourselves leads to paradoxes of the human condition.

One such paradox is the desire to check the number of impressions, reactions, reads, and views on various online forums where I am active, even though none of them will matter when I cross the threshold of death.

The sequence follows a familiar playbook in the middle of a mundane afternoon: I hit "publish" on a piece I wrote purely for the quiet joy of writing. Being retired, there is no editor to answer to, no career ladder left to climb. An hour later, while making tea or watering a plant, a sudden cue fires in the mind. An idle thought drifts in: How many impressions has it received? Has the counter moved since I checked an hour ago?

In retirement, when the imperative to build a resume has dissolved and the awareness of finite time grows clearer, logic suggests I should feel a serene detachment from such urges. For me, social media and online platforms are meant to be an idle pastime, a shield against boredom, and a way to stay engaged. And yet, the sudden urge to refresh statistics persists.

What are the origins of this paradox and the urge to check the statistics related to my posts? How can I frame this tension between the awareness of mortality and trivial metrics?

In one perspective, this paradox owes its existence to the fact that the awareness of mortality gets overridden by the innate desire to win the evolutionary race, to procreate, to ensure our lineage, and to satisfy the deep psychological imperatives with which we are burdened.

Throughout our evolutionary history, survival depended on our standing within the tribe to which we belonged. Higher social status meant better access to resources, protection, and mates. The human brain was hardwired over millennia to seek social proof, visibility, and group recognition as proxies for safety and belonging. In the modern context, statistics counters are simply a digital translation of ancient urges. Every view, like, or read is interpreted deep in our brain as a nod of acceptance, reassuring us that I am still seen, still valued, and still safe within the village, even if that village is composed of invisible internet strangers.

Another answer lies in the neurochemistry of anticipation—the mechanics of the dopamine loop [Link1, Link2].

Dopamine is not primarily the reward chemical; it is the molecule of anticipation, driving the urge to search, forage, and discover. In an evolutionary sense, this mechanism kept early humans scanning the horizon for fruit or tracking signs of game, ensuring our ancestors stayed motivated in a harsh environment. In the world of digital feeds, the unpredictable reward structure—never knowing if refreshing the screen will yield one view or fifty—triggers the exact same loop. The mere act of checking offers a quick spike of anticipation, pulling me away from the abstraction of mortality and locking me into an immediate chemical sequence: a cue, followed by action, in anticipation of a reward.

But that is not all. I can also look at the same paradox through a few other lenses.

Although we intellectually recognize the finality of biological death, we compulsively seek digital, symbolic, or social permanence to buffer against that reality. Checking impressions is an indirect pursuit of the immortality project. In his seminal work on Terror Management Theory, Ernest Becker argued that human culture and individual achievement are largely subconscious mechanisms designed to defend against the existential terror of our own mortality. Deep down, I know an article’s impression score will not survive my death or matter when I am gone—for when I leave, I leave. Yet tracking the metric offers a momentary, artificial sense of expansion, significance, and presence while I am here. It is a tiny, quantifiable proof of impact that says: I was here, and I left a ripple.

The logical conclusion of knowing that metrics do not matter should be calm detachment. However, we default to chasing artificial scorecards to fill the quiet void of human existence.

And finally, mortality is distant; checking an impression count is immediate. The human mind consistently favors the immediate over the abstract, and the immediate feedback loop of the present almost always overpowers the distant reality of the future.

Faced with so many adversaries, I invariably find myself drawn to the quiet attraction of numbers.

Ciao, and thanks for reading.

 

Riding Shotgun

Life steers the hog.
Mortality rides shotgun.

Scarves billow.
Together they ride—

mostly in harmony
into the orange sunset.