The Seat
and the Position Nobody Designed

I get into a carsharing car and the seat is already somewhere.

Sometimes so close to the steering wheel that I have to turn sideways just to fit. Sometimes dropped so low and pushed so far back that my arms barely reach. There is a joke about this. Lilliputians and giants using the same fleet.

But I don't think it's about size.

Most carsharing fleets now run high cars. T-Cross. Yaris Cross. A different geometry — higher seating position, more visibility, different angle to the road.

But many drivers come from sedans. Lower cars. A different posture, a different sense of where the wheel should be, a different feeling of control.

So they get into the T-Cross and they don't configure it for the T-Cross.

They configure it back toward what their body already knows.

I sit somewhere in the middle. The extremes I inherit — seat crushed forward, or dropped all the way back — belong to someone whose reference point I can't see. Maybe a decade in a low sedan. Maybe actual height. Maybe something else entirely. They were looking for their equilibrium. They found it. I just wasn't them.

They are not adjusting to the new car.

They are pulling the new car toward an older normal.

I noticed this in myself. In an Audi A3 or A5, I immediately feel too low. Nothing is technically wrong. But something feels off before I have time to think about it. My body is reading the car against a different reference — and reporting a mismatch.

That is the moment I couldn't unsee.

People do not enter new environments from zero.

They arrive carrying a previous normal. A trusted position. A body memory of what control feels like. And the first thing they do — often without realizing it — is try to restore that feeling inside the new system.

Not because they are resistant. Not because they are lazy.

Because that is how humans orient themselves in unfamiliar space. They find something that feels like before.

This is not only about cars.

I have watched it happen in every significant change project I have been part of.

A new platform arrives. People don't explore it for what it is. They immediately try to make it behave like the previous one. They look for the folder structure they knew. The report format they trusted. The approval flow that matched how they understood authority.

When they can't find it, they don't conclude the new system is different.

They conclude it is broken.

A new process replaces an old one. People follow the steps correctly. But in the gaps — in every decision the process doesn't fully specify — they default to old logic. The new structure runs on old instincts underneath.

A new team inherits a system someone else built. They sit down and something feels immediately off. Not wrong exactly. Just angled for someone else. They adjust the obvious parts and leave the rest. Their adjustments become the next inheritance.

In every case the same thing is happening.

The new environment is being pulled toward an older feeling of normal.

This matters for anyone designing or implementing change.

The question is not only: does the new system work?

The question is: what older normal will people try to restore inside it — and have we made space for that, or are we going to call it resistance?

Because most of what looks like resistance is not ideological.

It is postural.

Someone trying to find a position their body trusts in a car it has never driven before.

AI surfaces this pattern clearly.

When someone starts working with an AI tool, they arrive with a model of how intelligence responds — built from search engines, from previous software, from how colleagues answer questions.

They prompt the way they used to search. Short. Keyword-based. Expecting the system to fill the gaps the way it always did before.

When the output feels off, they don't think: I need to learn a new interaction model.

They think: this tool doesn't work well.

The seat is in the wrong position.

But the seat is exactly where it was designed to be.

Since noticing this in the car, I keep catching that first moment differently.

The body reacts before the mind explains.

The old normal arrives first.

That gap — between getting in and accepting where you are — is exactly where adaptation either begins, or quietly fails.