Every car in traffic holds someone with their own worries and destination. You’re not the only one stuck.

Crowds turn into obstacles in your head, which is why traffic feels like something being done to you. Every one of those cars has a person in it with a day as full as yours, running late for something that matters to them. Nobody is the traffic; everybody is in it. The same trick happens in a packed hallway or a slow queue, where people stop being people and become a thing in your way.

In the next crowd you get stuck in, pick one stranger and invent where they are going. It sounds pointless and it changes your mood within a minute. Irritation needs everyone else to be scenery.