Awesome week

With the Action Song costume coming to pieces and Birthday Gifts for school staff almost ready to be given out, this whole week was rather productive as far as I am concerned.

It is worth mentioning that this year is the nearest school that I have to commute to work. Some facts about this commuting distance is also interesting.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A short commute is worth more than a big house

Our commute to the office can have a surprisingly powerful impact on our happiness. The fact that we tend to do this twice a day, five days a week, makes it unsurprising that its effect would build up over time and make us less and less happy.

According to The Art of Manliness, having a long commute is something we often fail to realize will affect us so dramatically:

… while many voluntary conditions don’t affect our happiness in the long term because we acclimate to them, people never get accustomed to their daily slog to work because sometimes the traffic is awful and sometimes it’s not. Or as Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert put it, “Driving in traffic is a different kind of hell every day.”

We tend to try to compensate for this by having a bigger house or a better job, but these compensations just don’t work:

Two Swiss economists who studied the effect of commuting on happiness found that such factors could not make up for the misery created by a long commute."

and yes.... It is cooler to ride home when your car is under the shade :-)