A Petty Mans Guide to Surviving Thanksgiving Road Trip
Dear Uncle Bobby, We’re doing the big Thanksgiving road trip this year instead of flying, and my entire family is already getting on my nerves. (We haven’t even left the driveway.) My wife keeps reorganizing the snack bag, the kids keep “testing” the seat recliners, and my brother-in-law insists the route he found online is “definitely faster.” I’m trying to stay calm, but every tiny thing is making me irrationally angry. How do I survive this trip without losing my mind over petty stuff?
Drowning In Organized Snacks,
Tire-Pressure Tim
Well Tim, first of all, let me congratulate you on being the only honest man left in America. Everyone else pretends the Thanksgiving road trip is some kind of heartwarming, memory-building family adventure. You, however, have correctly identified it for what it is:
A rolling box of human irritation traveling 68 miles per hour toward a house you don’t want to stay in.
Now, you asked how to survive the road trip without losing your mind over petty things — but Tim, let me stop you right there.
The pettiness is the only thing keeping you alive.
In fact, I’d argue you SHOULD nurture your pettiness like a rare bonsai tree.
Your wife reorganizing the snack bag?
Perfect.
That’s an opportunity for you to sit there and make mental notes about exactly how many times she moves the beef jerky to the wrong pocket so you can bring it up in July 2027 during a completely unrelated argument.
Your kids “testing” the recliners?
Write it down.
Document it.
Notify NASA.
There’s no reason for a seat to be reclined at a 147-degree angle except to break your will, and I want you to treat that as the war crime it is.
Your brother-in-law’s faster route?
Oh, Tim… this is where the magic happens.
Let him direct you down his “shortcut,” wait until it inevitably adds 42 minutes to your ETA, and then — and this is important — say absolutely nothing.
Just smile.
The quiet, smug, soul-crushing smile of a man who will be bringing this up for the next 15 years.
Let the silence haunt him.
Let it become his origin story.
Remember: the petty man wins not by confrontation, but by thriving in quiet, vindictive satisfaction.
And while you’re trapped in traffic on I-10 behind three million other families pretending they’re on a wholesome adventure, lean into the pettiness.
Seethe at the smallest things.
Fixate on the way everyone breathes too loud.
Become emotionally unhinged by the smell of trail mix.
Make every minor inconvenience a constitutional crisis.
Tim, the road trip isn’t a test of patience.
It’s a test of who breaks first.
And with the proper application of microscopic grievances, that winner…
can be you.
– Uncle Bobby