Can the car thing please be given cement shoes and tossed into a harbour somewhere? It's horribly imprecise, and it's a simile, not a metaphor.

I love shifting gears, and I love bikes that can shift, but I'm bad at riding them. I'm not bad at shifting them, I'm always acutely aware of which chainrings I'm combining with which cogs, and why. But whenever I'm going uphill I start downshifting, and I give up on each gear so quickly that I end up in my lowest one, then I tire out in that one and I'm barely moving so I need to upshift so that I can get out of the saddle, then I shift more to get the right out-of-saddle cadence.

In the end, gears seem like nothing more than the tools I need to make climbing hell for myself. On a single speed I just do what I need to do to get up the hill. I spin when I can, I'll mash when I need to and I'll sprint when I feel like it.

Before I tried it I thought that single speeds were stupid (although the mechanical advantages were tantalizing) and that I wouldn't be strong enough to ride one, then I started riding a bike with stem shifters and I found it easier to pedal one gear up and down the hills than to shift it. So I stripped the derailleurs and stuck with a 48x20 (on 27" x 1 1/4" wheels) then later a 48x17. I rode a 10 speed mountain bike in the winter and felt again that I wouldn't be able to handle a single speed. Wrong again (except I saw it coming this time).

I just feel so much better when I ride them. Now I ride a 42x16 (switching back to 45x16 soon) fixed on 700x25c wheels most of the time and I only wish for variable gears is when I have a headwind. Fixed gear is nice, but I mainly like the little things, like no freewheel noise, or (unexpectedly) better control when stopping at lights even without trackstanding.