@OceanJangda shared a great article with me today about "the psychological benefits of commuting to work." It is excellent, it cites a lot of psychological research, and I would encourage all of you to give it a read. While it is never fun getting on a packed subway in the morning, the argument is that there are psychological and other positive benefits to commuting. It turns out, we need breaks in our day.
Here's an excerpt from the article:
But here’s the strange part. Many people liberated from the commute have experienced a void they can’t quite name. In it, all theaters of life collapse into one. There are no beginnings or endings. The hero’s journey never happens. The threshold goes uncrossed. The sack of Troy blurs with Telemachus’s math homework. And employers—even the ones that have provided the tools for remote work—see cause for alarm. “No commute may be hurting, not helping, remote worker productivity,” a Microsoft report warned last fall. After-hours chats were up 69 percent among users of the company’s messaging platform, and workers were less engaged and more exhausted.
@OceanJangda shared a great article with me today about "the psychological benefits of commuting to work." It is excellent, it cites a lot of psychological research, and I would encourage all of you to give it a read. While it is never fun getting on a packed subway in the morning, the argument is that there are psychological and other positive benefits to commuting. It turns out, we need breaks in our day.
Here's an excerpt from the article:
But here’s the strange part. Many people liberated from the commute have experienced a void they can’t quite name. In it, all theaters of life collapse into one. There are no beginnings or endings. The hero’s journey never happens. The threshold goes uncrossed. The sack of Troy blurs with Telemachus’s math homework. And employers—even the ones that have provided the tools for remote work—see cause for alarm. “No commute may be hurting, not helping, remote worker productivity,” a Microsoft report warned last fall. After-hours chats were up 69 percent among users of the company’s messaging platform, and workers were less engaged and more exhausted.
It also turns out that there's kind of a magic commute number. In the mid 1990s, Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti remarked that, all throughout history, humans have tended to cap their commute times at about 60 minutes per day. So a half hour each way. This was the case in ancient cities and it appears to be the case today (ignoring COVID).
What this mean is that as new technologies became available -- such as the automobile -- we were able to further decentralize and still only consume about 60 minutes of our day. Apparently the average one-way commute time in America is indeed about 27 minutes. Some people, of course, have much longer commutes, but this is the average. Currently mine is about 12-15 minutes with a coffee stop. Yes, it's luxurious.
This 60-minute rule of thumb has become known as Marchetti’s Constant. And there are a number of possible explanations for why this has remained the case. Again, the obvious one is that it helps us detach from work, which is why so many of us have felt burnt out while working from home. We haven't been shutting off and we need to.
This recent article by Amanda Mull makes an interesting argument about "Why Americans Really Go to the Gym." In it she argues that gyms aren't just about being healthy and looking beautiful. Part of the satisfaction of working out in a collective space is that, among other things, you get to be around people with similar values and you get to prove to others that you are someone with enough self-discipline to stay consistently active. In her words, "proving something to others is often a big part of proving it to yourself, and that's difficult to do when no one else can see you." Depending on how you interpret this, it might lead you to believe that we're all looking for a bit of validation from others. But I think the other way to look at it is that spaces such as gyms and offices aren't just empty vessels where we come to do our necessary work. They are also social environments that serve some potentially important psychological functions.
The other thing Mull's article touches on is the evolution of physical activity:
In the past 70 years, physical activity in America has transformed from a necessity of daily life into an often-expensive leisure activity, retrofitted into the foundation of people’s identities. As a concept, fitness was a response to the flourishing, sidewalk-free postwar American suburbs and what the fitness pioneer Bonnie Prudden dubbed “the tyranny of the wheel”: Americans went from strollers to school buses to cars, stripping out much of the on-foot transportation that had long characterized life in cities or on farms. “In the ’50s and ’60s, the body became a problem, and exercise developed—it had to develop—because people realized that we were all going to die of heart attacks,” Shelly McKenzie, the author of Getting Physical: The Rise of Fitness Culture in America, told me.
In short: we had no choice but to create a fitness industry because we systematically removed physical activity from our daily lives. You could argue -- as the above excerpt does -- that this was largely because of suburbanization and changes in mobility. But I don't think that's everything. We also changed the kind of work that a lot of us do and created technologies that allow us to do more without, frankly, moving all that much. Today, doing good work and being productive is often characterized by sitting still for extended periods of time and subsisting on empty calories so that you don't have to lose focus for very long. Indeed, working out our bodies, and consequently our minds, has become somewhat of a luxury.
It also turns out that there's kind of a magic commute number. In the mid 1990s, Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti remarked that, all throughout history, humans have tended to cap their commute times at about 60 minutes per day. So a half hour each way. This was the case in ancient cities and it appears to be the case today (ignoring COVID).
What this mean is that as new technologies became available -- such as the automobile -- we were able to further decentralize and still only consume about 60 minutes of our day. Apparently the average one-way commute time in America is indeed about 27 minutes. Some people, of course, have much longer commutes, but this is the average. Currently mine is about 12-15 minutes with a coffee stop. Yes, it's luxurious.
This 60-minute rule of thumb has become known as Marchetti’s Constant. And there are a number of possible explanations for why this has remained the case. Again, the obvious one is that it helps us detach from work, which is why so many of us have felt burnt out while working from home. We haven't been shutting off and we need to.
This recent article by Amanda Mull makes an interesting argument about "Why Americans Really Go to the Gym." In it she argues that gyms aren't just about being healthy and looking beautiful. Part of the satisfaction of working out in a collective space is that, among other things, you get to be around people with similar values and you get to prove to others that you are someone with enough self-discipline to stay consistently active. In her words, "proving something to others is often a big part of proving it to yourself, and that's difficult to do when no one else can see you." Depending on how you interpret this, it might lead you to believe that we're all looking for a bit of validation from others. But I think the other way to look at it is that spaces such as gyms and offices aren't just empty vessels where we come to do our necessary work. They are also social environments that serve some potentially important psychological functions.
The other thing Mull's article touches on is the evolution of physical activity:
In the past 70 years, physical activity in America has transformed from a necessity of daily life into an often-expensive leisure activity, retrofitted into the foundation of people’s identities. As a concept, fitness was a response to the flourishing, sidewalk-free postwar American suburbs and what the fitness pioneer Bonnie Prudden dubbed “the tyranny of the wheel”: Americans went from strollers to school buses to cars, stripping out much of the on-foot transportation that had long characterized life in cities or on farms. “In the ’50s and ’60s, the body became a problem, and exercise developed—it had to develop—because people realized that we were all going to die of heart attacks,” Shelly McKenzie, the author of Getting Physical: The Rise of Fitness Culture in America, told me.
In short: we had no choice but to create a fitness industry because we systematically removed physical activity from our daily lives. You could argue -- as the above excerpt does -- that this was largely because of suburbanization and changes in mobility. But I don't think that's everything. We also changed the kind of work that a lot of us do and created technologies that allow us to do more without, frankly, moving all that much. Today, doing good work and being productive is often characterized by sitting still for extended periods of time and subsisting on empty calories so that you don't have to lose focus for very long. Indeed, working out our bodies, and consequently our minds, has become somewhat of a luxury.
It used to be the case that cities had a habit of catching fire and burning down. Toronto had the Great Fires of 1849 and 1904. Chicago had the Great Fire of 1871. And the same can be said about many other cities. In fact, you probably weren't considered a real city until you had some sort of "Great Fire." But as Derek Thompson points out in this recent Atlantic article about urban comebacks, disasters have a way of forcing positive change:
The 21st-century city is the child of catastrophe. The comforts and infrastructure we take for granted were born of age-old afflictions: fire, flood, pestilence. Our tall buildings, our subways, our subterranean conduits, our systems for bringing water in and taking it away, our building codes and public-health regulations—all were forged in the aftermath of urban disasters by civic leaders and citizen visionaries.
As Charles Dickens famously described, British cities in the early years of the Industrial Revolution were grim and pestilential. London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds—they didn’t suffer from individual epidemics so much as from overlapping, never-ending waves of disease: influenza, typhoid, typhus, tuberculosis.
It's somewhat unfortunate, but oftentimes we need something to break before any action is taken. There's a bias toward the status quo. Otherwise, it becomes a question of, "what did we do last time? Well that worked just fine. Let's do it again." But hopefully all of this makes you at least a little optimistic about the future. Because history has taught us that when faced with adversity, we don't typically turn our back on our cities. Rather we turn around and make them better.
It used to be the case that cities had a habit of catching fire and burning down. Toronto had the Great Fires of 1849 and 1904. Chicago had the Great Fire of 1871. And the same can be said about many other cities. In fact, you probably weren't considered a real city until you had some sort of "Great Fire." But as Derek Thompson points out in this recent Atlantic article about urban comebacks, disasters have a way of forcing positive change:
The 21st-century city is the child of catastrophe. The comforts and infrastructure we take for granted were born of age-old afflictions: fire, flood, pestilence. Our tall buildings, our subways, our subterranean conduits, our systems for bringing water in and taking it away, our building codes and public-health regulations—all were forged in the aftermath of urban disasters by civic leaders and citizen visionaries.
As Charles Dickens famously described, British cities in the early years of the Industrial Revolution were grim and pestilential. London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds—they didn’t suffer from individual epidemics so much as from overlapping, never-ending waves of disease: influenza, typhoid, typhus, tuberculosis.
It's somewhat unfortunate, but oftentimes we need something to break before any action is taken. There's a bias toward the status quo. Otherwise, it becomes a question of, "what did we do last time? Well that worked just fine. Let's do it again." But hopefully all of this makes you at least a little optimistic about the future. Because history has taught us that when faced with adversity, we don't typically turn our back on our cities. Rather we turn around and make them better.
