Commuting

There’s a long article in last week’s New Yorker about people’s commuting experiences and the message is essentially that the longer your trip to and from work, the unhappier you’ll be.

By that gauge, I should be pretty miserable. I spend—honestly—about three hours a day getting from home to Cascadia and back, especially if I include the time it takes me to get geared up on rainy days.

But I’m not really all that unhappy, nor do I feel especially socially isolated, which Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam says is directly correlated to how long a person commutes.

And of course, my explanation will be obvious to anyone who’s ever talked to me or read even a couple of my postings: it’s because most of the time spent on my commute is spent on a bike.

So, while German economist Alois Stutzer observes that people who commute long distances trade off fun and exercise in order to secure monetary gains, I don’t have to do that: I get my fun and exercise right along the way.

Sometimes, I have these streaks where due to bad weather, tight schedules, or laziness, I end up riding the bus a couple days in a row, and when that happens, I do start to feel lousy, like a number, a mere face in the crowd, cog in the machine.

What gets me most is the sense of being trapped in the same routine, over and over.

On the bike, though, I generally have some small feeling of adventure: the light is different; the air feels unique; a squirrel darts across my path; I imagine that I could just keep riding all the way to Canada. Also, I’m out in the world, as opposed to inside a can moving through it.

This isn’t to say I don’t wish school was a few miles closer to home. On the other hand, if it were, I wouldn’t get to ride as much.