A societal pinch point is a situation, place or experience, created either by accident or without knowledge / inadvertently by
the creator, that forces human
interaction and will
inevitably lead to one or more involved parties entering / leaving the situation angry, upset, hurt, anxious, depressed and may end in violence.
Many people avoid these societal pinch-points all together out of anxiety or fear.
Examples:
- Merge lanes
- Any place humans have to form more than one line
- Any situation where manners / etiquette is unclear
- Parking lots
- Any physical place where people want something that there are too few of
- Being the first car in front at a red light
The drive through at my local
fast food restaurant has one of those two lane drive throughs, every very time I get in line, people always try and get in front, and when I order first and move up first, the person in the inner lane tries to cut me off, so I don't go to that fast food restaurant so as to avoid that societal pinch-point.
The other day I got stuck holding the door for someone I thought was right behind me coming into a building, turns out they were just far enough away and moving just slowly enough to make the whole experience a societal pinch point; do I hold the door, do I let it go, if I let it go am I an asshole, if I hold it am I a little bitch?
I was at the
grocery store to buy some flat leaf parsley and there was ten of them on the stand, when I went to grab one, a lady took all ten, and refused to give me even one because she needed all of them. When did my local
grocery store become a societal pinch point?
