The average commuter spends a genuinely staggering amount of cumulative life sitting in traffic or on public transit — enough, over a career, to add up to months, sometimes literal years, of pure transit time. Nobody fully processes this fact while it's happening, mostly because processing it would be too depressing to function afterward.
What People Actually Do With Commute Time
- Pretend it's "me time." A popular reframing, technically true, mostly coping.
- Listen to podcasts about subjects they'll never bring up again. Everyone has briefly become an expert in something via commute podcast and then forgotten all of it within a week.
- Have entire imaginary arguments with people who wronged them, winning every single one, decisively, in their head, with witnesses.
- Stare blankly and call it meditation. This is, generously, sometimes accurate.
- Develop genuinely strong opinions about fellow commuters they've never spoken to and never will.
The Actual Psychology of Commute Time
Researchers studying time perception and well-being have found commuting is reliably rated among the least enjoyable daily activities people report, regardless of length — even shorter than tasks people explicitly dislike, like doing chores. Part of the reason is the lack of control: commute time is neither fully "work" nor fully "personal," leaving it in an unsatisfying limbo that's hard to feel good about no matter how it's spent.
A Small Way to Reclaim a Tiny Piece of That Time
Some commuters have started using a few minutes of that otherwise-dead time for something slightly more deliberate: claiming a star on GalaxySpace from their phone, mid-commute, as a small two-minute act that's actually theirs — not work, not scrolling, just a brief, genuinely chosen moment in an hour that usually belongs to nobody in particular.
It's not going to give you back the year. But it's a genuinely fun two minutes to spend mid-commute — better than another imaginary argument you'll definitely still win.