fortes.com

This week’s New Yorker has an interesting article by Nick Paumgarten, There and Back Again, which really resonated with me. Here’s a relevant quote:

Three years ago, two economists at the University of Zurich, Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer, released a study called “Stress That Doesn’t Pay: The Commuting Paradox.” They found that, if your trip is an hour each way, you’d have to make forty per cent more in salary to be as “satisfied” with life as a noncommuter is … The commuting paradox reflects the notion that many people, who are supposedly rational (according to classical economic theory, at least), commute even though it makes them miserable. They are not, in the final accounting, adequately compensated.

“People with long journeys to and from work are systematically worse off and report significantly lower subjective well-being,” Stutzer told me. According to the economic concept of equilibrium, people will move or change jobs to make up for imbalances in compensation. Commute time should be offset by higher pay or lower living costs, or a better standard of living. It is this last category that people apparently have trouble measuring. They tend to overvalue the material fruits of their commute—money, house, prestige—and to undervalue what they’re giving up: sleep, exercise, fun.

I was spoiled by growing up in a small town — I found my daily commute from downtown Seattle to Redmond to be dreadful. It’s a little under 15 miles, but a one-way journey can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour and a half at peak hours (the median is about 45 minutes, but travel times are unpredictable). Honestly, this was a big reason I ended up leaving Microsoft.

The article brings up an interesting way to decide where to live:

Putnam likes to imagine that there is a triangle, its points comprising where you sleep, where you work, and where you shop. In a canonical English village, or in a university town, the sides of that triangle are very short: a five-minute walk from one point to the next. In many American cities, you can spend an hour or two travelling each side. “You live in Pasadena, work in North Hollywood, shop in the Valley,” Putnam said. “Where is your community?” The smaller the triangle, the happier the human, as long as there is social interaction to be had. In that kind of life, you have a small refrigerator, because you can get to the store quickly and often. By this logic, the bigger the refrigerator, the lonelier the soul.

I would add another important location: where you see your friends.

I sold my car just before leaving for China last year, and I’ve stayed car-free since. Seattle isn’t an English village, but the points of my triangle/rectangle are all within walking distance of where I live — and I love it that way.