Commuting and Adaptation

When I lived in London, I used to have to take the bus to Oxford. Without traffic, the ride took 70 minutes, which was just long enough to catch up on my reading and iPOD playlists. But as anyone who knows the M40 will tell you, there is almost always traffic. As a result, I never adjusted to the annoyance of commuting. While I would happily tolerate the 70 minute bus ride - this was my baseline - I would get furious at the fender-bender that made my ride home take twice as long. Commuting was a continual crapshoot, and it drove me crazy.

This is one of the more important and ignored facts of psychology. While people can adapt to just about anything - our nervous systems are adept at habituation - we can't adapt to unpredictable situations. The morning traffic is one of those situations. Unlike chronic pain, which eventually becomes less painful, commuting remains a constant pain-in-the-ass. Nevertheless, people want their 3.5 bedrooms in suburbia, and are willing to live in the middle of nowhere to get it. We are quickly becoming a nation of extreme commuters. From the WSJ:

A report released yesterday by the National Research Council's Transportation Research Board looking at U.S. commuting patterns from 1990 to 2004 found that more commuters are leaving for work before and after the traditional peak hours of 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. In addition, the report found that the off-peak group gained about half of all new commuters from 1990 to 2000. In particular, commuters starting their journey to work between 5 a.m. to 6:30 a.m. gained about 25% of the growth in commuters, and those leaving between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. gained more than 12% of all new commuters.

Much of modern psychology doesn't have direct application to daily life. But the old truth of sensory adaption is a profoundly relevant fact. We will habituate to the bigger home, and the nice front lawn. We will even adapt to that big screen HDTV. After a little while, we will start taking these material pleasures for granted, and they will stop giving us joy. But the pain of commuting will remain. If you want to make yourself happier, walk to work.