this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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Years ago I learned that it's vastly better for my mental health to take a route that's 25% longer but has significantly less traffic.
Nowadays my commute is non-existant.
When we moved from the city to the middle of nowhere, our commute went from 8 km to 22 km each way. It still took about 20 minutes. But "rush hour" was the occasional herd of deer or elk instead of a bunch of drivers who were either too aggressive or too passive. A "traffic jam" was one vehicle, ours, waiting for a piece of farm equipment to move out of the way a few times a year instead of the weekly transformation from roadway to parking lot.
Even when I switched over to driving school bus, I could count on one hand the number of other vehicles I interacted with each week.
It's impossible to express how much that improved our mental states.