Sevastian Winters has spent thirteen years driving a tractor-trailer across America, watching humanity perform its strangest rituals at seventy miles per hour. The left-lane campers. The competitive mergers. The self-appointed highway enforcers. The terrified drivers entering an interstate at the approximate speed of continental drift. The people who apparently believe a turn signal is a legally binding challenge to prevent you from changing lanes. And yes, the professional drivers who should absolutely know better.

But this isn’t a book about bad drivers. Not really.

Through sharp observations, fictionalized stories drawn from very real behavior, and the gloriously unfiltered perspective of a man who has spent far too much of his life staring through a windshield, Winters begins dissecting the different kinds of assholes we encounter on the road—and why they do what they do. What begins as a hilarious field guide to the idiots surrounding us slowly becomes something far more uncomfortable: an examination of fear, ego, impatience, competition, entitlement, aging, distraction, anger, and the stories we invent about complete strangers simply because they happen to be occupying twelve feet of pavement we wanted.

Because sooner or later, every driver has to confront one deeply irritating possibility:

Maybe the asshole isn’t always the other guy.

Driving is a cooperative activity that we somehow experience as a competition. Someone passes us, and it feels personal. Someone merges ahead of us, and suddenly we’re defending territory. Someone makes a mistake, and within seconds we’ve assigned them motives, intelligence, character, and probably an entire defective childhood. Yet every driver on the highway is doing exactly what we are doing—trying to get somewhere while navigating a system none of us controls.

Zen and the Art of Not Driving Like an Asshole is funny, profane, surprisingly thoughtful, and occasionally uncomfortable. It is part driving book, part human-behavior study, part philosophy, and part confession from a professional driver who eventually discovered that knowing exactly what everyone else should be doing doesn’t give you jurisdiction over a damn one of them.

You cannot control the driver who cuts you off. You cannot make somebody merge correctly. You cannot force another person to put down the phone, use the accelerator, leave enough following distance, or get the hell out of the left lane.

You control the steering wheel in front of you.

And as it turns out, that’s not just a lesson about driving.

Fasten your seatbelt. Check your mirrors. And prepare to discover which asshole has been riding with you all along.