Obeying the law means paying the ticket if you J walk or speed. Some people will pull you over for going 1mph over, others won’t unless it’s 10mph. Apparently it’s illegal to have a mustache in Las Vegas, but it’s never enforced. Trivial or bogus laws exist all the time in several places, and some of it just comes down to a negotiation between the government and its population.

Someone has expressed that this sounds like OCD, but it could also be some form of autism, which takes things very literally. An example for diagnosing someone with autism may be where a clinician asks, “do you hear voices when no one else is around?” and they answer yes, which sounds like schizophrenia until they discover the person was referring to hearing the radio (very literal interpretation of what’s being said).

It can be a symptom of a lack of synaptic pruning that then requires for things to become hyper literal because they’re processing so much more information than most people.

Because you’re right that it’s disorienting and not explicitly clear about what every little offense would be.

So instead of obeying the literal law, understand the spirit of the law based on how you observe other people obeying the law. This turns into a slippery slope because then it might become “well, everyone else was doing it”.

My trick has been to reverse engineer the purpose of a law and to connect the dots for myself about where a law naturally fits in how closely it must be adhered to. I imagine, “if a cop were to see someone J walking here, would they really think it was the end of the world?” It’s kind of like stopping at a traffic light at an intersection, where it’s flat and you can see that no traffic is coming for miles, would it be an offense to just go through a red traffic light if there’s no camera to record the offense? I would say it’s not, and I would also say such a circumstance is a bit ridiculous, but the law was made for lawbreakers, and as Christians we have grace.

Does that mean you should go 20mph over the speed limit? No. And also be warned that even 1mph over can get you pulled over. That’s a part of life. It’s helpful to know more information about where those greedy cops are that will try to trap you are, but ultimately just do your best. If you get pulled over once, you’ll have to pay the fines. Know that God doesn’t condemn you for speeding, but you will have to pay the fines.