If you are an American with average commute time, you spend about 250 hours in transit each year — that adds up to more than 10 days. By the end of your career, you might spend nearly a year of your life commuting…
— from an op-ed by Sergio Peçanha in the Washington Post, “How much of your life will you lose by going back to the office?”
Seems to me, the scientists have been ignoring the most important question there is.
Which is not to say, they’ve been sitting on their hands. Many amazing things have been discovered and explained. Multi-billion-dollar telescopes have been constructed, capable of peering into the hearts of distant galaxies, and beyond. Unbelievably minuscule atomic particles, invisible to even the most powerful microscopes, have been turned inside out and dissected, to reveal even smaller particles. The genetic code of dangerous viruses have been mapped, to produce amazing vaccines that work occasionally. Incredible electronic devices have been invented, to allow my refrigerator to talk to my TV. Thanks to science, we know quite a bit about the sexual habits of fruit flies, and how earthworms find their way in the dark.
As you probably heard, a team of physicists at the University of Oregon, funded by the National Science Foundation, ran some new calculations and discovered that the universe is not actually 13.8 billion years old. A new research paper published in the Astronomical Journal gives the true age of the universe as 12.6 billion years.
These things, we’ve heard about.
What we still don’t know is: how much time are we wasting?
Like, right now, for example, I’m sitting at my computer, writing a column for the Pagosa Daily Post, to be shared this morning with literally dozens of readers. I estimate that the article will take about four hours to write. (Accounting for trips to the kitchen, and checking my email.)
A total fricking waste of my time?
The scientists cannot tell me. Or, if they can, they’re pretty damn quiet about it. Too busy calculating the age of the universe?
Nor will they reveal whether the literally dozens of Daily Post readers, who will click on this column and attempt to read it, are wasting their time.
If a scientist wants to spend his life studying the sexual behavior of fruit flies, more power to him. (I assume it’s a “him”, in this particular case.) But for the average person, who might have been spending a year of his or her life stuck in traffic prior to the COVID pandemic… are there more important things to consider?
What about a so-called journalist, who will spend the next 20 years trying to write humor articles? Is that of concern to anyone with a Ph.D. and a grant from the National Science Foundation?
My hat is off to writer Sergio Peçanha for attempting to tackle that central (and very important) question in the Washington Post this week, in the op-ed mentioned above: “How much of your life will you lose by going back to the office?” The online article includes a handy “time wasted during your daily commute” calculator.
I didn’t bother with the calculator, personally, because I don’t work in an office, per se. I have a writing desk in my bedroom, squeezed between the dresser and Roscoe’s cat box. How much time do I spend commuting… from my bed, to my desk (and back again, for my afternoon nap)? A total of about one minute per day. A decent scientist could easily figure out how much time I waste commuting to work, without needing an online calculator. (We could certainly consider my morning ‘commute’ from my bed to my desk as “time wasted.” But the ‘commute’ from my desk to my bed, for my afternoon nap, probably shouldn’t be included in the calculation. A nap is never a waste of time.)
But the question of wasted time is much more important to all those folks who used to drive an hour or two to their office jobs, and then — as a result of the COVID pandemic — suddenly found themselves working remotely, from a desk in their bedroom, next to the cat box.
The virus itself got a lot of attention from the scientists. (Too much attention, in my humble opinion.)
But the people working remotely, who now no longer needed to be stuck in rush hour traffic while drinking their strawberry-spirulina smoothies and checking their Instagram accounts? Did the workers get any attention? Not that I can discern.
So we might ask ourselves. Who’s been wasting time? Or even, who’s been wasting their lives?
The scientists studying fruit flies?
The workers driving an hour each way to their jobs, day in and day out?
The online humor columnists with nothing better to do?
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.