Nobody likes commuting. Living far from where you work doesn’t make sense to me. It messes up your sense of community. If you drive it pollutes, isolates you, and keeps you from exercising.

I’ve done well about keeping my commutes short. Business school, at thirty minutes door-to-door, was one of my longest commutes. Since it was by subway it probably didn’t pollute that much. Mostly my commutes have been fifteen minute walks plus some working from home — six years of graduate school were about that, both at Penn and Columbia, as was starting Submedia.

Everybody with a long commute has extenuating circumstances about difficulty finding jobs in their field or wanting lawns or something like that. Or they say they like the time alone.

Baloney! If you like time alone, you don’t need a commute for it. You can just schedule time alone. I’ve never heard another reason that didn’t sound like someone was trying to make up for not having this part of their life together. I guess there are suburbanites and exurbanites whose values I don’t understand, driving Hummers or buying McMansions. Maybe there’s something to that life if I understood I would embrace.

Anyway, if your commute is too long, you can probably shorten it.

• ← People who claim not to judge and blame often do, illustrated, part 2
• My beautiful eight-minute Shanghai commute →