Advice My Uber Driver Shared, Which We Could All Use in 2020

January may be over and done with, but it’s never too late to gain some new inspiration for how to get through 2020. The following is the story of the Uber driver who passed on a really important message to Steven and me, which we could all use this year - and frankly for the rest of our lives.

Ever since we moved to the Marina/Russian Hill area, Steven and I have enjoyed the weather and sunlight, the clean(er) streets, the parks and the endless stream of adorable dogs. But with every neighborhood comes both ups and downs. And one of our downs is something we can never learn to love: Marina bro/girl culture. The one thing we dreaded before moving here was the infamous newage Marina culture of spoiled rich kids - pardon me - technically grown adults who believe the rest of their lives should function like rush week, act entitled to being treated like kings and queens, assume it’s normal for a 25 year old to own their own two-bedroom condo, and site yogalates as a religion. And while we’ve met countless individuals in this neighborhood who are lovely and nothing like the stereotype, that brand of person is still unavoidable.

On our way back from dinner on Fillmore Street, Steven and I had a run-in with Marina bro/girl culture. We were riding in an Uber driven by a middle-aged Chinese woman who wished us a happy Chinese New Year and gave us each a package of fried sesame balls - a treat that is considered to be good luck. She explained to us that she wanted to share part of her culture with her passengers and that she had plans to improve herself for the new year.

As we pulled up to a wide intersection, she accidentally drove a foot or two into the crosswalk. Luckily there were no pedestrians for 20 or 30 feet. She apologized to us for the abrupt stop. Suddenly, these Marina girls - With their obligatory brown boots, zip-up hoodies, dyed-blonde hair, Starbucks coffee cups and golden retriever - popped into view, as they had started crossing from the other side of the intersection.

They got angry at her for being slightly in their way, and started yelling at her sarcastically: “Uh thank you!" “Thank you!” “Thank you you dumbass!” as they giggled with one another. One girl threw her blonde curls back in a cackle, as she tripped over the golden retriever. The second girl turned her coffee cup upside down and spattered coffee on the hood of the Uber driver’s car. Steven and I got so angry - I wished I was on the street so I could have yelled at them. Part of me feels like if there had been a big buff guy in the drivers seat, they wouldn’t have acted the way they did. But who’s to say; Maybe they’re just so obnoxious that they’d do that no matter who they were dealing with.

Wow. I thought to myself. So glad this city is pricing out all of the hard-working middle-class people to make room for more assholes like them.

“I’m sorry that happened,” I said to her.

“Yeah, these people are terrible,” Steven said.

But as we drove off, the Uber driver did something surprising. She started laughing. “It’s fine. I feel sorry for them.” She continued: “How sad is it that when someone upsets them, all they can do is throw coffee? You know, with this New Year, I have promised myself that one of my biggest goals is to let things like that go. Now I have coffee on my car - so what? If I don’t get upset, they don’t get satisfaction.”

Here I was fantasizing about dragging those girls by their ponytails down the street, and it wasn’t even my car that the coffee had been poured on. And yet the woman who this had happened to was cool as a cucumber.

(The harsh reality of the situation is that girls like the ones we encountered don’t care if you react to what they’ve done or not. They live in a world where any sort of behavior is acceptable, so long as it’s being doled out by them. People like that don’t get called out, and are always protected by some white knight every time someone wants to put them in their place. The only way they can ever learn to stop treating people that way is if someone stands up to them and tells them in public and puts social pressure on them to change. And even then they probably will convince themselves they’re in the right. So if you see an entitled person acting this way for the hell of it, I do encourage you to say something to them in public.)

However, she was so right about the fact that we shouldn’t let what they do bother us internally. We shouldn’t walk away from these events with the emotional burden of what went wrong and what someone did to hurt our feelings. At the end of the day, it’s nothing personal. The driver pulling up two feet too far was an accident. And those girls did what they did not because of who we in the car were, but because of who they are.

Sure she probably had to spend time that evening sponging mocha latte off her hood, but she left that situation with her dignity and those idiots didn’t.

I’m not the biggest believer in new years resolutions; they can be vague, arbitrary and unhelpful. But I do like the idea of using the new year as an opportunity to better yourself. This woman’s Chinese New Year goal for herself inspires me, and should inspire anyone else who could use it. We need to stop letting other people’s egos and self-hate make us stoop down to their level. And stop forcing ourselves to carry their harsh words/actions with us as a mark of how the world perceives us.

Instead feel sorry for them that they’re so childish and ignorant that they don’t know any other way to problem-solve. And most importantly, keep that golden retriever in your thoughts and prayers.