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People regularly commute 3 hours to and from work. The longest commute in America is 7 hours each way. Extreme communting is up, up, up. Why in god's name do people do this to themselves, especiially when we know it makes them unhappy?
So, this guy doing the 7 hour one seems to enjoy it. But a study of moment to moment happiness by Kahnemann and Krueger of 500 Ohio women suggests that commuting is the least happiness-inducing time spent there is ("intimate relations are the best").
Posted by: Barkley Rosser | April 13, 2007 at 05:09 PM
BTW, Kahnemann and Kreuger found that in terms of who the women like to spend time with, friends were at the top, husbands a bit further down, children even lower, with only bosses at the bottom, the only one below being alone.
Which suggests that commuting with friends may be a partial solution to this unhappiness of commuting problem.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser | April 13, 2007 at 05:11 PM
I recently completed a period where I was commuting 1.5 hours(one way)4 days per week. I'm aware of the environmental/economic downside, but I confess (gulp) there were benefits. My life is incredibly full- incessant demands of family life, a small business and my own professional work. I shift gears from role to role innumerable times in any given day. I saw my commuting time as "my time". I could process the events of the previous activity and then prepare for the next gear change. No one was interrupting my train of thought. No one was trying to change the radio station. This time truly became meditative.
Posted by: Sandy | April 14, 2007 at 07:34 AM
Barkley and Sandy - Touche! Very, very nice (and counter-intuitive) points. With all the happiness-mania out there (heck Oprah did a show on it), it might be time to get the counter-point out there, especially viz commuting.
Posted by: Richard | April 16, 2007 at 09:52 AM