Commute

I took the overnight train last night from DC, where I was visiting my family, back to Boston.

There were three distinct phases of the trip. The train was sold out for DC-NYC leg. My seatmate, who shared her stash of old Bewitched episodes with me, got out with 3/4 of the train at 2:30 a.m. at Penn Station. Then there were several hours of dark and quiet as we slipped silently through Connecticut, stopping at a dozen stations, with no one getting on or off.  As the sun rose, we passed into Rhode Island, and the commuters started boarding.

The train got in to Boston at around 8pm, so a good 50 people were commuting two hours this morning and another 100 were communting one hour. (This is not counting however far they had to go from South Station.)

This way of living confounds me.

I have a lucky tendency to find jobs ahead of moving to a new city, so I’ve spent three years of my working life with a brisk twenty minute walk as a commute. This is just enough time to listen to one side of an album, or to half of a This American Life podcast. It’s enough to get your blood flowing (or your teeth chattering, if you’re in New England in the winter) and to wake you up before work.

I would wish everyone a commute like that, except I’m sure somewhere out there is a lucky fool who enjoys spending an hour and a half in traffic every morning.

I did a training once (on transcranial magnetic stimulation, it was pretty cool) and to get to the medical center I needed to spend over an hour on the train each way. I didn’t mind it, because it was only for two weeks and I got a lot of reading done, but my days seemed unbearably short by the end. It’s not the commute itself that’s the problem - there are ways to amuse yourself during a commute, especially on a train - but the time loss that bothers me: three hours a day. Fifteen hours a week. 750 hours a year. If you assume a 40 hour work week, that’s the equivalent of 18 weeks - 4 months of extra work.

God, what could you do with that four months? Backpack across Europe, go to school full time for a semester, write a novel, learn an instrument or a language passably well.

When I was younger, I thought that I must be the laziest person on earth, because I couldn’t understand why people would give up half of their lives to work, let alone to get to work.

Since then, I’ve worked 100+ hour weeks on political campaigns, pulled regular overnights on a hotline, and sacrificed the occasional weekend or date night if there was a grant or a paper due. And I realize: it’s not that I don’t like hard work.  In fact, I rather enjoy it.  I dislike the loss of time, of opportunity - of the chance to sit out and watch the sunset with friends or family, to paint or write or cook or code, to stay up late reading.

I resent the general time sacrifices modern work demands. What does it say about our working culture that giving up months of your life each year to commuting is considered normal?