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Last week, it was announced that gasoline prices in Des Moines had fallen 7.2 cents per gallon compared with the previous week, settling at an average of $2.56 per gallon. This meant that prices were 11 cents per gallon higher than the same day a year earlier and 33.9 cents lower than a month ago.

Carefully taking all of these statistics into account, I decided that if the red line gets close to the “E,” I’ll stop at a convenience store and buy gasoline. If not, I won’t.

From the Nixon-era days of lining up to buy gas – which I don’t actually remember at all – through the 2008 panic about prices nearing $4, this has been my strategy. I prefer to think of it not as lazy shopping, but as dollar-cost averaging.

The only trouble is, it’s hard to feel like a true American when you secretly don’t care about the price of gasoline. Clearly, we’re supposed to be obsessed with the subject; it’s a regular feature on the morning news shows. The producers sometimes will dispatch a team as far as five blocks from the studio for an on-the-scene report.

They tell me whether the price is shockingly up or delightfully down. Then I drive to work. It’s either that or wait for the development of teleportation.

How big a deal is this, anyway? Let’s say you drive the national average of 15,000 miles per year, and your vehicle gets 25 miles per gallon. That’s 600 gallons of gasoline you have to buy each year. If the annual average price were to go up 20 cents, which most TV morning news anchors would consider pretty scary stuff, it would cost you an extra $120 for the year.

That’s not enough to take the family to a ballgame, not with $5 bratwursts and $6 drinks. You’re going to spend more than that on Christmas presents for people you don’t like. The average American probably burns through somewhere around $1,000 a year on fast food and fancy-schmancy coffee.

So why we’re supposed to worry so much about gasoline?

If I were in charge of filling the tanks at Ruan Transport Corp., or handling the Delta Airlines credit card, I would spend a lot of time thinking about fuel costs.

As a commuter, no.

Not that higher gas prices are a good thing. Although I would point out that if they want to get rid of Americans, the boys in the front office at al-Qaeda should try to lower the price of crude oil. The more miles we drive, the fewer of us make it back home.

No, it just seems as if our worry could be better applied elsewhere. You only get so much worry in this crazy world, and once you’re done fretting about your college football team and your neighbor’s taste in lawn ornaments, you’ve already used up half of it.

Most people look at it this way: When it comes to handbags, software and french fries, I can choose to buy or not; but I have to buy gasoline, so I’m a frustrated, helpless captive of the system.

Here’s another way: I need gasoline to do the things I want to do and have to do, and I can’t build my own refinery, not unless Popular Mechanics comes up with something. So if there’s nothing I can do about the price, there’s no point in worrying. Hey, that’s just the way we Taoists think. You other religions are on your own.

There’s just not much the little guy, or even the medium-sized guy, can do about gas prices. Once there was an organized protest, calling for all Americans not to buy gasoline on a given day. And then the next day, everybody filled up again. Not sure how much impact that had on the long-term planning at Chevron Corp.

I drive a car that gets a fine 35 miles per gallon, and every time I fill the tank and mentally calculate the mileage, I think about how lucky the Earth is to have me.

Then I get behind the wheel and worry about something that really needs worrying about. The emerald ash borer, for example. I don’t know what to do about that.