Is Car Rotting the New Self-Care?

This piece was written by one of our dear readers—a woman with something real to say. Each month, we handpick the best submissions for Dear Reader because we’re after that PROVOKED bite: truth, intelligence, and heart. These stories come from women our age—women who’ve lived enough to know better and still care enough to tell it anyway. Because being seen and heard matters. Because storytelling is how we stitch ourselves to one another. And because when one woman speaks her truth, another finally recognizes her own. — Susan Dabbar, Editor-in-Chief

When your house is loud, your brain is overloaded, and you need five minutes of peace—your parked car becomes the only room with a lock.

“How’s the driveway?” my husband texted me one afternoon.

Feeling sheepish, I glanced up to see him waving from the window. I was home after running errands and had stayed in the car, the engine idling as I scrolled social media. The sunlight was fading and I had groceries to unload. Yet my body remained planted in the driver’s seat, as if controlled by some cosmic force.

The term bed rotting—a catchy way to describe lounging in bed and avoiding responsibilities—found its way onto our social media feeds in 2023. Now a similar term, car rotting, is sparking conversations online. It’s the equivalent of bed rotting, but inside a vehicle. And whether we’re in our driveways or elsewhere, a lot of us are doing it.

In parking lots at gyms, grocery stores, and offices, I’ll look up to see other people—often midlife women like me—tapping away on their phones. It’s as if we’re all members of a strange club, engaging in the same solitary ritual.

Why are so many of us finding solace by sitting in our cars, staring into tiny screens?

Alone In Our Cocoon

From worries about equal access to health care to concerns about finances and our jobs, women have experienced a lot of stress and anxiety over the past few years, said Catherine Sanderson, Ph.D., Amherst College psychology professor and author of books including The Positive Shift: Mastering Mindset to Improve Happiness, Health, and Longevity. The fact that we’re heading to our vehicles to decompress makes perfect sense, Sanderson explained.

At home and in the workplace, women perform much more cognitive labor than men, Sanderson told me. We walk into our homes and think, “I’ve got to vacuum and I’ve got to do the laundry and I’ve got to make the bed and I’ve got to deal with the dog,” she said. At work, we’re the ones planning our colleague’s birthday celebration or the annual Secret Santa exchange. But in the confines of our cars, there are no such obligations. No one is asking us to do anything.

Car rotting provides another perk: the chance to be by ourselves. Whether we have partners, kids, or both, women are rarely alone, Sanderson noted. After years of driving my children around, I now have a teenager who’s been able to take over a lot of the chauffeuring. Almost overnight, the vehicle that shuttled high-energy kids and their various sports and dance gear morphed into my own private midlife fortress, albeit with remnants of Goldfish crackers.

For many of us, our cars have become the ultimate safe space. “You’re in this little cocoon,” Sanderson said. “It’s almost like the equivalent of the man cave.”

Avoidance? Yes. Self-Care? Also Yes.

Is car rotting avoidance or a legitimate form of self-care? It’s both, according to Sanderson.

In one sense, we’re avoiding the tasks and people we don’t want to deal with, whether it’s the pile of clutter in the kitchen that our husband never notices or the child who misplaced the soccer cleats yet again. I lingered in my car that afternoon because I knew the instant I stepped into the house, I’d be back in task mode, throwing dinner together while scolding the dog for barking maniacally at squirrels. As long as I stayed put, I didn’t have to do any of those things.

The decision to postpone these duties can be a valid act of self-care, too. In the car, I can recline the seat and catch up on the latest batch of text messages from my sister. I can listen to a trashy podcast and wait for the stars to dot the sky. If it’s a particularly tough day, I can do what 76 percent of women have done in the privacy of their cars: break down and cry.

The Power of Small Moments

It’s worth noting that on the spectrum of self-care activities, sitting and scrolling for 15 minutes in a driveway is “a crazy low bar,” Sanderson said. We’re not getting our nails done, checking into a luxury hotel, or going golfing for three hours with friends. And we’re still on our phones, accessible and available to anyone who needs us.

In her book Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis, Ada Calhoun explained why we tend to limit the scope of our deepest desires. She wrote: “Sometimes a woman will try something spectacular—a big affair, a new career, a ‘she shed’ in the backyard—but more often she sneaks her suffering in around the edges of caretaking and work.”

Car rotting is self-care that we perform around those edges, in those moments between dropping off a kid’s forgotten school lunch and dashing to another meeting. It feels embarrassingly inadequate.

And yet, it’s a form of self-care that’s realistic and accessible, Sanderson pointed out. Few of us could drop everything and jet off to Europe for a month, or as Calhoun wrote, “If I went on an Eat, Pray, Love walkabout, who would pick up the kid from school?” But we can click through funny Instagram Reels or drive to a park and watch the birds and squirrels. Over time, these snippets of self-care could matter more than we think.

“We often underestimate these small moments,” Sanderson said. But those ordinary moments are what make up our lives. Maybe we can string together more of them, she added.

That day in the driveway, when my lovely spouse texted me just to check in, I felt like I’d been caught in the act. I’ve since reflected on why my first instinct was to feel shame. Maybe it’s because that unstructured time by ourselves “almost feels like a guilty pleasure,” as Sanderson put it. But it’s a guilty pleasure that can be healthy and restorative, I’ve realized.

So if you’re reading this while sitting in a random parking lot, scrolling TikTok or catching up on a true crime podcast, you’re in good company.

Carry on.

You deserve it.