The Great Escape

Nice Try, Ford…

“How do you wrench happiness out of the cold, miserly hands of capitalism? How do you be less lonely in a world with billion-dollar industries designed to profit from loneliness?”

“…we should be mindful about allowing tech to steal something away from us that we would not have otherwise”

The title of this post, ‘The Great Escape’, is also the title of an old (1963) Hollywood movie about a group of WW2 soldiers from the allied armies all stuck together in a brutal Nazi POW camp. They collaborate on a daring escape then split up and individually make their separate ways across Europe toward freedom. This film was a product of Hollywood’s old ‘Studio System’ when it was at its peak and by today’s movie standards is painfully slow and full of predictable clichés. But if you can get past all that stuff, it’s still well worth streaming. It features a huge all-star cast and happens to have one of the greatest and most famous motorcycle chase scenes ever put on film. Its underlying message is simple, powerful and important, too: Freedom is worth risking your life for, fighting for, and if necessary, dying for. (Watch on YouTube, free, here.)

Fast forward to now. Recently I spent a week behind the wheel of a nearly brand-new Ford Escape mini-SUV during a vacation in Florida with my wife and her mid-eighty-year-old parents. The Escape turned out to be a nice-enough machine: Simple to learn and use. Comfortably held all four of us and our luggage fine. Did exactly what we need it to do. The car rental guy looked at our documents and pointed to a row of mini-SUV’s saying “Any of those in that row over there. Your choice.”  It was a nice selection: A Mitsubishi, a Nissan, this Ford and two or three others. One smelled like smoke. Two had around 30,000 miles and this Ford had only 2,900. All decisions should be this easy.  

Off we went and right away I could feel this car had ‘state of the art’ electric power steering. My own car back home is a nineteen-year-old 120,000+ mile vehicle with now-obsolete hydraulic power steering and a manual transmission. It’s an old-fashioned mostly analog car with a very thin overlay of digital electronic fuel injection, anti-lock brakes and an extremely slow-responding small nav and entertainment screen. Its driver’s door pocket holds several old-fashioned printed state highway maps which have not been used in many years. I’m happy with it.

For all the nice stuff in the Escape’s overall package, the electric steering was a deal-breaker. I could feel the difference, moment by moment, going in either a straight line or around a curve. It’s a subtle but herky-jerky feeling compared to fully analog hydraulic steering. I just could not stand how it steered. Beyond that both the new Escape and my old car back at home are ok, but they are only cars. Escape-wise neither is even remotely comparable to any motorcycle. I gotta tell ya Ford, no car ever made is an actual “Escape” vehicle compared with a motorcycle. Nice try, but every motorcycle comes a lot closer to providing an escape than your mislabeled SUV.

Throw a leg over any bike and you say goodbye to the admittedly useful convenience, safety, and banality of cars. They are mostly useful if you happen to need to haul around a few other people and a few largish items like their airplane-compliant roller bags. 
 
In one way or another, most of our tools and technologies sell us the same thing: Time. From the first stone axe and spear to the latest and most sophisticated practices in industrial agriculture and farming, to the satellites up in the sky to the roads and cars we all use, to the most cutting-edge A.I., almost everything technological is about giving us more time to do the things we most value and enjoy doing; The pleasures of being with our friends and relatives, playing games, working with our hands and bodies, watching TV and movies, reading, falling in love, mating and raising a family. This has always been so.

It's both a cliché and a truism to write “Time is the only thing in limited supply -- there is an infinite supply of everything else.” There’s lots of money to be made selling people ‘time saving’ technologies. A useful measure of the value and importance of any new thing is in how time-saving it is. The more time it potentially can save us, the more costly it is. Computers, jet planes, communications satellites and A.I. all are near the top of this list. But there is a point of diminishing returns, though that exact point is a little different with every technology and for each of us. 

Does a dish washing machine save time? Yes. Of course. Do dish washing machines prefer that special soap which eliminates the need to manually and carefully rinse food off the dishes? Yup. Do either of these wonderful time-saving technologies help calm a busy mind? Nope. Does handwashing one’s dishes do that? Yup. You can make the same argument about manual vs. automatic gearboxes in cars. Or power windows and automatic-opening trunks and hatchbacks. Save time…or feel better? This is always a choice. You have a choice.

The Ford Escape mini-SUV is a wonderful example of a vehicle designed to provide relatively high levels of convenience, safety and comfort affordably -- and to save one as much time as possible in the management of its operation. But it isn’t an escape from much of anything. It’s merely another brilliant example of marketing, engineering and capitalism combining to help you save time -- so you’ll have a bit more time to do the kinds of things you enjoy doing more than driving around in a mini-SUV.

It is human nature to seek comfort, safety and efficiency. Conflicting with those normal and natural inclinations are all the less-comfortable, less-safe, less-efficient and sometimes harder things we do which require continuous attention and focused engagement. Walking and bicycling are two obvious examples. Motorcycle riding is maybe a bit less obvious, but even a relaxed casual motorcycle ride requires this same type of effort. When body and brain must continuously and seamlessly work together to accomplish some physically challenging tasks which involve using our sense of balance, that activity puts us in what some call ’The Zone’. This is when our conscious sense of the passage of time diminishes. After said activity concludes one experiences a uniquely relaxed state of bliss due to the beneficial neural, physical and biochemical changes (endorphins, dopamine, etc) which were generated.

Extending this idea further, when more people routinely have more of these kinds of experiences more often, societies function better. In other words, better-functioning people perform individually and collaboratively better, thus make better societies. But when (and where) more people move toward experiencing less of these fully engaging situations there’s a decline in how well both individuals and societies-in-aggregate function.

There’s no simple clear-cut way to defend this hypothesis. It’s partly an analytic result, partly a gut feeling and partly a personal observation about how I feel and function after any walk, bicycle or motorcycle ride, compared with how I feel and function after driving or riding in a car, and after looking at any screen for a while. Our comfort-seeking nature isn’t bad; but it’s only the low-hanging fruit. Life’s best stuff hangs a bit higher, and getting to it requires a little more effort.

Whenever I decide to put on my R-3 suit and ride off to work or for errands anywhere too far away to travel by foot or bicycle in the time available, or to travel for recreation using any of these three methods, I’m choosing a compromise between the comfort, safety and convenience of a car and the more holistic health benefits walking, pedal bicycling and motorcycle and scooter riding produce. Riding provides a near-perfect blend of comfort, efficiency and happiness, even on cold, dark rainy days.

My advice? Use and enjoy every time-saving technology as necessary, and without guilt, but also try to be aware of the trade-offs involved. Sometimes a Ford Escape is not an escape at all. When and if you have the time and resources, it’s very nice to have a motorcycle in your quiver of personal mobility options, and if you do, with the gear needed to allow riding be more of your all-weather all-destination transportation, you’ll never look back, and you’ll never regret it. Choosing to ride there will make a difference inside of you, and to the world surrounding you. Riding is truly ‘The Great Escape’, and just like freedom, it’s always worth the time, risk and additional effort.

– Mr. Subjective, Sept 2025

PS – Despite the optimistically mis-named rental car, our vacation was wonderful. Seashells, Sunshine, Gulf of America and Mexico, and lots of old and mostly happy people everywhere.

PPS – Also, this link takes you to a very nice thirteen-page printable essay I ran across on a substack that influenced my thinking about all this. And here’s another link to a printable essay about all this that I also enjoyed.