Depending on where you live, your commute to work or school may be short or very long. Your mode of transportation probably consists of one or more of the following: walking, taking a bus, subway/train, or even a ferry. I used to commute to my High School through a yellow bus since there is no public transit in the countryside where my High School was located. I would have to wake up early and be at my bus stop by 7 am and make up my loss of sleep on the bus since I usually slept around 2 or 3 in the morning. Sleeping is a great way of killing time on the bus since my commute was about 45mins. I would also sleep on the way back from school since I have motion sickness and taking a school bus in a country road does not help at all. I typically find commutes suck up your energy and time and would get frustrated about the loss of time. Perhaps not so much since I lacked sleep anyways. But I’m sure many of you who commute through public transportation feel that your time is being wasted. During commutes, you are losing productive time that can be spent on things more valuable to you.
I have seen many people doing different things during commutes and it’s interesting to see how we spend our time. I think our activity during commutes reflects a bit about our personalities and how smartphones changed the way we interact and consume time. Some common activities during commute I see are:
- Talking with friends who are also commuting
- On Instagram or some form of social media
- Texting
- Playing some mobile games
- Calling family or friends
- Reading lecture notes
- Reading Books
It’s been almost a year since I moved to the city I currently live in due to my internship. I’m sure most of you would ideally move near your workplace if you live away from home but that was not the case for me which is another story. My commute is about an hour to an hour and a half from work depending on if I get onto my 2nd transfer on time. I soon realized that I was getting bored with my commute. I don’t have any friends who take the same bus as me and most interns chose to live very close to work so I cannot kill time talking with friends. But I could use my smartphone to communicate with friends and family or kill time by going on social media, watch movies, or play some mobile games. I would imagine our parents would envy the many options we have in the 21st century to kill time. We have a multi-purpose device that could do many things such as communicating with people who are far away and having a “TV” in your hands. We have so many ways to entertain ourselves during commutes. Our parents never had handheld consoles, the internet, portable TV, nor a medium to contact people instantaneously. We are so stuck with our mobile phones that it seems to be like we are enslaved to a device we created. Being a person in IT and spends on the computer during my free time as well, I wanted to take some time off the computer since I’m on a computer for over 14 hours a day. But I am not willing to compromise my time on the computer when I am at home so I decided to not rely on my phone during my commutes. I decided to pick up reading instead.
I am finding a lot of kids who grew up past the late 90s dislike reading. I am not a big fan of reading either. Perhaps that is why audiobooks have become a thing since we dislike reading and like to entertain our minds with visuals and with our auditory senses and books does not provide those. Like many others, I don’t read books unless you count manga as books. Many fans of anime would prefer to watch anime than read the manga and even more so than reading the light novels because of the reasons I stated above regarding entertaining our minds. Seeing a blob of texts or formulas turn off a lot of people. I have not read a book seriously (other than a few light novels) in a very long time. I am in Computer Science and I also minor in Mathematics so I never need to read books other than textbooks. The last time I probably read out of my own enjoyment was probably in Middle School which has been over 7 years.
Anyways back to the topic of reading during commutes. I have been trying this for the past 11 months and I have learned to appreciate reading books. You’ll be surprised how much you can learn from reading. Of course, that depends on what you read as well. I truly believe reading enhances your thinking, imagination, knowledge, and become more open-minded. I have picked up quite a few books and created a goodreads account to keep track of my reading. I may not have read much in the past 11 months but I can say that I enjoyed my commutes a lot more. I don’t think I would have picked up reading if my commutes were short. My commutes back in University were typically short, about 10mins and I typically was on my phone during those commutes unless I was with my roommate or classmates. I used to dread my hour and a half commutes home from work until I picked up reading. I no longer care if I miss my 2nd transfer. I’ll just simply go inside the building connected to the hospital (I get off at the Hospital Bus Terminal) and use the washroom and go on reading till the bus comes.
The books I typically read are usually non-fiction and are often very insightful such as my month Linux Journal, “A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science”, and 12 Rules for Life. If you look at all the books I read in the year of 2018, you’ll see that all the books except for “Learning Perl” and “UNIX System V” are read during my commutes.
Recently I started to add fiction into my reading repertoire. So far it only consists of Light Novels from movies such as “5 Centimeters per Second”, “Kizumonogatari”, “Your Name”, and “I want to Eat Your Pancreas”. But I do plan on expanding outside of Light Novels eventually to rereading The Chronicles of Narnia which is perhaps my favorite Western fiction series.