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DRIVE TIME, ALIVE TIME

If time be of all things the most precious, wasting time must be the greatest prodigality.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Your commute does not need to be the most dreaded and frustrating part of your day. On the contrary, it can contain some of the most enjoyable and productive minutes of your morning and your evening. But only if you stop looking at your commute as a prison sentence—and see it instead as an opportunity. It’s a choice to turn the dead time where you can’t do anything to alive time where you are learning, growing, or practicing mindfulness. It’s a simple distinction: alive versus dead. Choose to be alive.

Getting Owned

One of my favorite comedies of all time is Office Space, directed by Mike Judge, the genius behind Beavis and Butt-Head, Idiocracy, and Silicon Valley. It’s about a software engineer named Peter Gibbons who has basically had it with his boring life, his unfulfilling relationship, and his dead-end job. Early in the movie, he goes to a hypnotherapist with his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend to get better. He tells the therapist that the reason he’s there is that every day is the worst day of his life. His nemesis is a clueless middle manager who passive-aggressively hounds him about making sure he uses the proper cover sheet on his TPS reports. Later on, talking to his neighbor about what he’d do with a million dollars, he says he’d sit on his ass, relax, and do nothing. Peter’s neighbor, like a redneck Confucius, reminds him that you don’t need a million dollars to relax and do nothing. “Take a look at my cousin,” he says. “He’s broke, don’t do shit.”

Know where Office Space starts? In the car. On the way to work. In the span of ninety seconds, we see Peter go through anger, frustration, panic, desperation, exasperation, and defeat as he tries to navigate gridlocked traffic on the way to a job he hates. Mike Judge made this the very first scene in the film because he knew millions of people would immediately identify with Peter’s plight and every single emotion he was experiencing. Office Space came out in 1999, and not a lot has changed about our daily commute since. Actually, that’s not true. One thing has changed: our commute has gotten worse.

Since 1980, when the US Census began tracking them, commutes have gotten 20 percent longer. And it’s not just one part of the country—it’s all of it. The average New Yorker spends nearly 70 minutes commuting to and from work each day. In Washington, DC, the average lobbyist, cabinet secretary, and government worker spent 32.8 minutes getting to work. On the West Coast, it takes the average Oakland resident 29.9 minutes to get to her desk, and the average worker in the Inland Empire 29.8 minutes. Three percent of the US population commutes more than 90 minutes each way.

And that’s just America: the land of long drives, suburbs, and five-lane highways. In Western Europe, where they supposedly have superior public transportation and are more “enlightened” about the environment, the average commute is actually longer than America’s most congested cities. Better grab another éclair for the road!