Petoskey — Every breath freezes in the early morning air. Heavy snow falls from a gray winter sky. You hop in the car and thank the gods of innovation for your heated steering wheel.

How did those poor souls survive the dark days before heated steering wheels? Positively medieval. Your fingers might get frostbit without it. You need it, don’t you? 

No. You most certainly do not need your heated steering wheel. In fact, this decadent luxury is probably making you pointlessly weaker in the lamest way possible.

One common retort: “What’s wrong with being comfortable?” Past a certain point, comfort starts to erode something vital within us. It would be really comfortable to work in a hot tub all day. Sitting there, bubbling as you type on your laptop. It would also be pathetic. 

Another: “They first thought of heated steering wheels in the 1920s, and they aren’t new at all.” This is true, but it’s deceiving. There were patents for heated steering wheels long ago, but they weren’t ever adopted en masse, and the heating systems in the cars of the 1920s didn’t have today’s powerful heating systems. They were freezing in winter.

If you have deluded yourself into thinking you need a heated steering wheel, you have fallen victim to a kind of comfort worship that erodes the base level of strength and resilience necessary for life in Michigan.

The heated steering wheel isn’t some crucial established feature of the modern world. It wasn’t common 20 years ago. When I was a kid, no one had them. Yet today, there is a disturbing number of people who claim to “need it” and really mean it. For comfort addicts, this decadent luxury has become a necessity.

This is feature creep, of course. The gradual expansion of more and more pointless features—which always result in higher prices for consumers— is a fact of our modern world. So easily forgetting how life was in the past, and then projecting one’s satisfaction with the present into a dissatisfaction with the past, is a kind of retconning. 

Retconning, for those not aware, is a process of altering past details in order to make the past more consistent with the current perception of the present. It’s lying to yourself (and others) about the past so it makes more sense with how you feel about the world today. Pretending that the heated steering wheel is anything other than an extremely unnecessary luxury is an outright lie. No one felt like they needed it before, and you don’t need it now. 

So many things of the modern world have made our lives better: medicine, clean drinking water, indoor plumbing, the telephone. Yes, it could be argued that they all make us softer in some way. Civilization itself is a softening process after all. But these things make our lives better in ways that are clearly quantifiable: less disease, more efficient use of time, the ability to speak with loved ones more often. These benefits far outweigh the softening. 

But there surely is some point, somewhere, where convenience born of technological development stops elevating us and starts eroding something vital within us.

The heated steering wheel is a perfect example. It does nothing but weaken us. It stretches the base-level of comfort to an unreasonable, unsustainable, and fragile point. What happens when the heated steering wheel doesn’t work anymore? The addict is up a crick without a paddle.

Those who claim to need the heated steering wheel desperately seem to forget the fact that gloves exist. They work very well. You can buy them pretty much anywhere. You can wear them outside or in your car. Gloves are anti-fragile, where the heated steering wheel is fragile. 

Many who rely on the heated steering wheel eschew gloves. They clench their bare hands tightly, as they scurry from heated car to heated store. Their comfort and fragile lifestyle is completely dependent on the heated steering wheel.

Unless you are an elderly individual or suffering from a rare crippling disease that wreaks havoc on your blood circulation, you don’t need a heated steering wheel. This isn’t as radical as a 6 a.m. cold plunge, it’s simply about preserving a bare-minimum level of adaptability and fortitude.

Imagine extolling the virtues of your heated steering wheel to your great-grandfather. He wouldn’t be impressed. He didn’t need a heated steering wheel. Neither did your father. Neither do you. 

O.W. Root is a writer based in Northern Michigan, with a focus on nature, food, style, and culture. Follow him on X @NecktieSalvage.