I tried to learn to drive on a manual transmission. My mom has always driven manual so it made sense since that was the car available to me at the time. I hated

I tried to learn to drive on a manual transmission. My mom has always driven manual so it made sense since that was the car available to me at the time. I hated it though. I'm sure it's fun if you're already a driver, but after years and years of riding my bicycle and becoming accustomed to dealing with traffic, pedestrians, etc at the speed of a bicycle, driving was a huge mental shift for me. The fact that I also had to worry about the transmission and that the car would violently let me know that I was doing it wrong turned it into a nightmare. Driving an automatic meant that I could focus completely on the road and not killing myself or anyone else. An interesting analogy that I thought of at the time was manual memory management. Stalling the car felt an awful lot like throwing a seg fault. I haven't followed the analogy very far so it might break down, but it's certainly true that in the right hands (race car drivers, kernel programmers?), C and stick shifts can be wielded with devastating effect. I never actually finished learning to drive though, as I live in NYC now, so YMMV (literally).