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You definitely feel more closely connected to the car than you do on an automatic. For me, at least, it was more of a youth thing - I don’t enjoy driving nearly as much as I did in my 20’s.

I am not terribly old, but my dad insisted I drive stick (he grew up with a manual crank-start car in India), and all of my cars were manual until I went EV. I think I was far more attentive driving a manual, and that’s carried over but slowly fading. Just the awareness you need of your driving situation —- eg do I need to pass and does that require me to downshift? —- made me far more vigilant than I otherwise would have been.

My first 14 years of driving was always with a manual car, after that I've driven an auto most of the time and 99% of the time I do miss the manual. After a while, it became, almost, automatic and wasn't much of a hassle in traffic or anything.