I have been believing this for a very long time. I recently went looking for the source of this advice, I couldn’t find any—do you have any idea where the source is?
(reason: I have gotten anecdata about how people take advantage of public transport and then shifted to live closer to work and lost their “daily reading hour”. AKA this advice had a negative impact on them. Some of the papers I started reading specifically mention bad health, and being overweight leading to other health problems but the happiness discrepancies usually disappear once you correct for health. Another point mentioned was lower back pain while driving and sitting in traffic. which—for someone who rides a bicycle to work, isn’t the same problem. I would be keen to update this advice to something more accurate and more specific than “live close to work”.)
Indeed there are not studies linked to in the repository post.
Independend of that I’d read the advice more as the avoidance of useless time. Useless in the really useless sense of time where you can’t read, think, talk or anything because you are busy looking for the next connection, switch trains, hurrying along and such. “daily reading hour” sounds like quite productive use of time but is only possible if there are longer stretches of uninterrupted commute.
I believe a number of happiness studies have found commute time negatively associated with happiness, but I don’t have any references on hand, and if the ones you’re seeing don’t have that I’m surprised.
If you dig down 3 links you find the Commuter’s Paradox. I found this paper to use very reasonable controls and explain itself well. Sadly, it doesn’t address your question about different modes of transportation.
Good question. I am not sure where I originally found the idea that shorter commutes make you happier, but I suspect it might have been an earlier version of this from 80000hours, which cites a couple of studies. Googling for pre-2013 media articles shows a lot of mentions of the idea as well.
The idea about a well optimized train or bus ride that Dr_Manhattan brought up also makes sense, if you live in an area with decent public transportation. It’s the car drives that are a big time-killer, since you can’t really turn your brain off while navigating through traffic, and traffic is usually more stressful at times you need to get to work.
There are a few productive things you can do during long drives though. For example, you can practice speeches, elevator pitches, songs, comedy bits, and so on without anyone hearing. That may not be quite as effective as interacting with another person on a bus/train, but the lack of an audience/consequences can make it easier to try out new things. Also, there’s the option of consuming audio content (which you could also do with headphones on the bus or train).
Top boring advice: live close to work.
I have been believing this for a very long time. I recently went looking for the source of this advice, I couldn’t find any—do you have any idea where the source is?
(reason: I have gotten anecdata about how people take advantage of public transport and then shifted to live closer to work and lost their “daily reading hour”. AKA this advice had a negative impact on them. Some of the papers I started reading specifically mention bad health, and being overweight leading to other health problems but the happiness discrepancies usually disappear once you correct for health. Another point mentioned was lower back pain while driving and sitting in traffic. which—for someone who rides a bicycle to work, isn’t the same problem. I would be keen to update this advice to something more accurate and more specific than “live close to work”.)
Indeed there are not studies linked to in the repository post.
Independend of that I’d read the advice more as the avoidance of useless time. Useless in the really useless sense of time where you can’t read, think, talk or anything because you are busy looking for the next connection, switch trains, hurrying along and such. “daily reading hour” sounds like quite productive use of time but is only possible if there are longer stretches of uninterrupted commute.
I believe a number of happiness studies have found commute time negatively associated with happiness, but I don’t have any references on hand, and if the ones you’re seeing don’t have that I’m surprised.
Papers:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/16078055.2014.903723 http://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(12)00167-5/abstract http://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2458-11-834 http://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(07)00745-3/abstract http://www.gallup.com/poll/142142/wellbeing-lower-among-workers-long-commutes.aspx
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3560964/ but these were not clear about what about longer commutes is a problem other than potential health problems.
As above:
(urgh comment formatting is annoying and those characters don’t let me escape them)
If you dig down 3 links you find the Commuter’s Paradox. I found this paper to use very reasonable controls and explain itself well. Sadly, it doesn’t address your question about different modes of transportation.
Good question. I am not sure where I originally found the idea that shorter commutes make you happier, but I suspect it might have been an earlier version of this from 80000hours, which cites a couple of studies. Googling for pre-2013 media articles shows a lot of mentions of the idea as well.
The idea about a well optimized train or bus ride that Dr_Manhattan brought up also makes sense, if you live in an area with decent public transportation. It’s the car drives that are a big time-killer, since you can’t really turn your brain off while navigating through traffic, and traffic is usually more stressful at times you need to get to work.
There are a few productive things you can do during long drives though. For example, you can practice speeches, elevator pitches, songs, comedy bits, and so on without anyone hearing. That may not be quite as effective as interacting with another person on a bus/train, but the lack of an audience/consequences can make it easier to try out new things. Also, there’s the option of consuming audio content (which you could also do with headphones on the bus or train).
It seems like the advice would be better adapted to:
With a second line: