What an odd sentence in the article: "But a more child-centered approach to parenting also seems to be a factor, as these executives make other major sacrifices in order to balance their professional and home lives."
I would argue that not having a parent at home in the evening (because they are commuting) is the opposite of child-centric. Yes, they get a nice suburban home and parks, but what about parental bonding?
And they kept saying "I didn't want to uproot my family blah blah." Is there no value in exposing your children to unique and different experiences? I'll have failed if my kids grew up in the same town/city all their lives.
I grew up in the same small Scottish town my whole life, as did all my friends. I'm now 32, live in London, have travelled the world, but best of all, I still very regularly see my old school friends. Giving kids culture growing up is one thing, but giving them the gift of being friends with the same people since they were 3 is amazing. My uni friends have come and gone, I barely see them, but I see my old school mates every few weeks and every time it's full of laughter and reminiscing from a lifetime together.
My dad worked in the oil business in the 80s and 90s and spent months at a time in places like Saudi, Norway, etc. In hindsight, I would never have wanted to move around with him as a kid. Sure I would have liked him at home more, but at least we all knew where home was.
we want our daughters to have exactly that, it's great to see our 2-year-old make friends that she could reasonably expect to finish High School with, and that might even last a lifetime
I agree with this. My dad was in the military, and we moved every three or four years. I was always jealous of kids who had lifelong friends, and tired of always being the new guy.
Different strokes. We moved all over the place as a kid and I felt like it immensely broadened my horizons and gave me a richer life. I feel like I learned a great deal of humility through the experience, seeing radically different world views contrasted side by side gave me the ability to dissect my own beliefs and know just how fallible they could be.
>> I'll have failed if my kids grew up in the same town/city all their lives.
I grew up in a family that had to move around a lot, to the point where I attended 3 different elementary schools, 2 different junior highs and 1 high school. We were not rich but poor. And I SO WISH I had grown up in same neighborhood so that I could've have made some friends in my childhood.
You can go live in different towns/cities when you are older. For kids, I highly recommend for kids to have stable environment with mostly same friends at least until college time.
I agree, having grown up similarly. It's very important to be able to grow roots. Not being able to because of frequently relocating can cause a permanent feeling of being disconnected throughout adult lifehood as a result.
No, that's what you're experiencing I think. And 'news flash' makes you sound very condescending, can't help but wonder if this was intended.
Anyway, you might feel disconnected. I actually was disconnected, multiple times, from my friends, environment, and had no other possibility but to start from scratch. So I don't even understand why you feel the need to compare, to be honest.
fully agree, stability first. mine story is similar. one can travel for rest of his/her life if wanted, but friends from childhood/teenage years are often something special and irreplaceable in life. if you don't nourish those relationships, usually they fade away.
you're not doing anybody any favor dragging kids around the world because of your crappy career goals, it's just being selfish.
If you want to be super good parent, take them each year for a month long vacation somewhere far and exotic (ie very different than their usual environment), that's more than enough.
It isn't just geographical either: I spent many formative years in a single school-system as an expatriate in Hong Kong... But despite being a long-term resident everybody else (or at least, those who spoke English and went to my school) kept cycling in and out. (Executives' kids, military service-members' kids, etc.) I wouldn't be surprised if the yearly turnover was 10-25%.
I don't think that moving a thousand miles or so between 8th and 9th grade was that helpful for me. I suspect that for a lot of the people who make such moves, it is a matter of moving from one suburb to another, with fairly nuanced differences in outlook.
Depends on kids, some adjust very well some not well at all. If they don't adjust well you are abusing them and creating psychological problems that will haunt them for many years to come.
Isn't this article saying rather the opposite, namely that these people are willing to endure pretty horrible conditions in order to maintain some stability for their families?
You can argue about whether or not it'd be better for the kids to uproot once and have mom or dad at home every night, but they are at least central to the decision which implies a much higher degree of importance than you're suggesting.
I've done various commutes in my working life. Nothing beats being able to walk to work:
1) It's not too far,
2) It's exercise - what's not to like?
3) It's always, ALWAYS, the same length of time. Which allows you to plan.
4) It's not too far.
My least favourite commute is on the British motorways, one day it could take the minimum amount of time, the next it could be 4 times longer. This amount of variation adds to working stress levels. It's really difficult to plan to get something 'out of the way' in the morning when you don't even know if you'll be there in time.
you never really truly appreciate what impact your commute has until you have a 5 minutes walking commute.
I did this at some point for around 1 year. It was awesome.
3) above did not apply though. I had to cross a really busy street (i.e. car traffic) and the pedestrian traffic light took around 2.5 minutes (I kid you not).
Depending on that damn traffic light my commute time could be 4 minutes or 6+ minutes. Recall being really annoyed, to the point of hating the traffic light.
Indeed, it's something you can really appreciate on a university campus where most everything you need as a student is within 10 minutes of walking. Amazing how easily we give that up for a fat paycheck and a mortgage.
Is this the next "I work 27 hour days and never leave the office" thing people will brag about? I understand keeping a family together is good parenting but is choosing to spend 3-4 days a week elsewhere good parenting? I would question that versus relocating them if needed.
Being at home tired Fridays to Sunday afternoons is not what I would call good parenting. It means the wife (and I guess we're mostly talking about women here) is carrying the family.
Spot on - the wife/partner carrying the family is the biggest issue in my daily 4hr commute. Also an issue is just not able to be there in an emergency. For example, my wife locked herself out of the house yesterday and fortunately her parents who are close have a spare key. But children or pets get sick/injured and you really need to be close and that is always a worry.
But if someone works relatively long hours they may not see their kids much regardless. For example if someone works on Wall St - they may have to leave the house at 6am and be home at 8pm. That doesn't leave a lot of time to see young kids.
Sorry to use this occasion to brag about my commutes for the last 10+ years: 6 miles, 4 miles, 2 miles, and 4 miles. For the last 7+ years it's been 100% by bike.
A 20-25 minute bike ride is actually better than a shorter commute because you get just enough exercise every day.
Almost 1 year ago I gave up a 90-minute each way train commute in Sydney for a 20-minute cycle commute in Ireland (obviously there were other factors).
I love the freedom to come and go when I please, and not be held up by seemingly random infrastructure failures that can ruin your whole evening.
I've actually found myself extending the bike route to get a bit more exercise in (when it's not lashing that is).
Yep. When's the last time a crash on the bike lane added 40 minutes to your commute (unless it was your crash)? Construction on the bike lane = extensive detour? Nope.
I'm doing ~4h per day. Every day, from Monday till Friday. I use the train. 1:40h is one way + some foot walk.
But it's really annoying and it feels mostly like wasted or very unproductive time.
I would argue that the train is still a better place to work than the car because it has much less abrupt accelerations. I would get motion sick working in a car when driving through a city.
Anyway, the mobile Internet connection still sucks, and in addition the data plans usually are only about 100MB per month. In the morning, I usually try to sleep somehow, but I cannot really, and it fells far less restful than in bed. In the evening, I often try to work but the productivity very much depends on the task. Some task require a constant good SSH connection (Mosh makes it a bit better) and you have to edit files and switch forth and back remotely through apps. If you sometimes have to wait a minute or even if it's only seconds to complete some keystrokes, you get insane. Sometimes I read some research papers, but you don't have a big desk in front of you where you can put other papers, a notebook + computer to look up other things while reading, or make notes, etc - the place is just not there. Also, it's often very loud and other people talking constantly directly next to you. You can try with earplugs or music - but it's just not as productive as you would be in a silent environment.
That is in Germany, the RE4 train from Wuppertal to Aachen and back.
I would move to Aachen and I will move when my girlfriend is finally finished with her education in Düsseldorf + Krefeld (again other cities...).
Wow! that is a long commute. I have a friend who commutes from Leichlingen (20mins out of Cologne) to Aachen every day! He catches the RE48 into Cologne, and then ICE to Aachen, about 90mins one way. He said that the changing of the trains really stops him from doing any meaningful work on the laptop. I can understand that
He said that he use to drive, but that was killing his motivation. He told me is biggest fear is his reliance on the public transport with strikes and transport reliability. Fortunately, both are quite rare in Germany when compared to other countries.
A four hour commute with a self-driving car will be just as painful as four hour communute with a train, except that the cost with the car will be much higher. I honestly don't see self-driving cars changing a lot here.
Honestly, how many people can get up in the morning, get ready for work, go to a car and then just fall asleep again? I guess the percentage of people who will be able to sleep on a commute will be quite low; I know I wouldn't be able to do that.
Not quite. It will be painful from a family standpoint (cannot have breakfast/dinner with family) but commute-wise I would imagine a much better experience:
1. You would be guaranteed a seat. Even when I get a seat on the MetroNorth, the first and last miles are painful -- it still requires a 45min standing subway ride to Grand Central and a 10 minute standing ride from the station to the office. Same thing on the way back.
2. You would be able to sleep in the car since it would likely not require transfers or the risk of missing your stop
3. You could keep all your stuff in your car - laptops, books, etc. The space I have in a NYC subway car is pretty minimal
Charles Montgomery wrote a book, The Happy City, about how urban design affects people. He cited multiple studies that showed that long commutes are very detrimental to people's happiness. Long commutes dramatically increase divorce rates for example.
>Wait till cars become automatic. 4 hour per day commutes could become quite normal.
and now you will be able to work all these additional hours. Your employer will even generously provide you with the good mobile connection, or even with the whole connected autonomous car :)
Cars are already "automatic". Automatic in the sense that I hop on the train and 40 minutes later I'm at work. During the trip I either get started with work or read a book and have tea depending on what's going on. Plenty of people do it, I assume it's the main reason trains have free wifi here.
I still wouldn't consider anything over an hour-long commute, simply because it'd be taking way too much time from the rest of my life.
clearly you have never used caltrain as a method to get to work.
4h commutes ARE normal in the bay area. the transit system is the worst in the world asz compared to general income and overall development of the country
Structuring your life quality, and structuring out cities for life quality, should become the norm. We should be eager to sacrifice work efficiency.
Unfortunately our civilization took this wrong race-to-the-bottom turn where instead of ten 30 hrs/week jobs we have four 70 hrs/week jobs. This is wrong and unsustainable, and we're going to lose a lot of people to a combination of burning out, family failures, suicides and other bad stuff.
In the century XXI, we should fight the network effect, not embrace it.
Tangentially to the article, this whole sacrifice of personal life is starting to make me think about other options. And I don't even work long hours.
Last week I had to travel, to work abroad for that week. To be there on Monday morning, I flew Sunday just after lunch. I missed around 25% of my weekend and all the "after-work" time and activities I usually have. I just moved (within the same city, a few days before traveling), and my girlfriend had to finish the packing, cleaning and all that fun stuff by herself.
It was not a big deal actually, as it doesn't happen frequently, but - with this post - it got me thinking. Shouldn't we make a bigger deal of it? The fact that companies expects this kind of commitment - very outside working hours - reveals so much about the inequality in the employee-employer relationship.
And I'm not even mentioning the fact that I work on a country where I'm paid x, but was traveling to work in a country where my fellow associates in similar functions are paid 4-5x. :)
It seems that the author assumes that readers uderstand that the comparison is between the described lives/jobs with ones in the past where it was basically you never see your family (or, more likely, you don't have one).
I would argue that it would be better for the kids to live abroad.
They'd become bilingual for free, and most importantly it'd give them perspective and a better understanding of the world.
Unless his kids are planning to become professional American football or lacrosse players, his justification seems very weak to me.
The guy was born in Brazil, lived there till five, moved to the US, then lived in Brazil for two years as a missionary, and is now doing business there. He probably has a pretty good idea of how beneficial living in Brazil would be for his family.
He's also very wealthy and can afford to give all his kids personal language tutors if he/they want to learn another language. The value of knowing Portuguese in the US is generally not that high (although obviously he's an outlier). They can travel internationally whenever they want. If they moved there, they wouldn't be living or going to school with your average Brazilian, they'd be living in a wealthy neighborhood and going to an English-language international school. They live in one of the wealthiest places in the US, so they probably attend very good schools right now.
Since they're Mormon, many of these kids will end up being missionaries in foreign countries and learning another language anyway and getting a decent perspective on the world outside Connecticut since their living environment as a missionary will be roughly equivalent to the average person wherever they're assigned.
Don't underestimate the importance of high school sports to kids that love them and are in high school. I'd rather my kids have four years of positive team sporting experience than learn Portuguese. One can learn and grow from sports in many ways even if they don't become a professional athlete.
As for what will best help their career, it's probably the stable familiar living environment they currently have at a private school that will best prepare them to get into a good college and do well there. Being good at sports doesn't hurt either for getting into good colleges.
Finally, he can easily sleep in first class for the two direct flights he takes per week and he can spend (potentially, we don't know how much he works on the weekends) Thursday (not sure how much of the day), Friday, Saturday, and Sunday with his family. He can also potentially video conference with them every other evening. And they've probably come with him on occasion.
Is it a coincidence that the folks mentioned in the articles are in high profile high salary jobs? These folks has these commute already factored into their salary package.
Here is a question, how many middle level managers or engineers are doing these type of crazy commutes in the US?
This is crazy. I'd rather take a low paying job somewhere close if I can't move for some reason than spending half my life commuting. Currently I feel that my 20 minute bike commute is pretty long, but I couldn't find a nice apartment closer to work.
How is this new? This is the sort of thing the wealthy and the C-suite have been doing for decades. The internet makes parts of it a little easier, but it's not novel.
The whole conceit of the Concorde was Executives could live in New York and work in London or vice versa.
This is not just a 1% phenomenon. There are plenty of families where one partner commutes 2-3 hours each way on the greyhound bus because they can't find a job in the same town and can't afford to live on a single income.
The examples in this article kind of are a 1% phenomenon. They are an active choice made by the commuters to spend a lot on airfare and (presumably pricey) accommodations, rather than just relocating their family to similarly luxurious accommodations closer to their workplace.
In your example, you're talking about people for whom the choice of living closer never presents itself, due to unaffordability.
The former is a luxury choice, the latter is a forced circumstance.
I'm about to go from a 40min commute to an hour and a half commute (or so). It's quite astounding how many people commute in from the suburbs to downtown when it would be much easier and cheaper just to setup smaller offices in the suburbs or allow more remote work.
It's also amazing to me that after 30+ years, the suburbs are barely built up. It's somehow economically sustainable to move a bunch of people from point A to point B but not to have point A built up with more shops, industry, etc.
If you are optimising for having nice accommodations for your family, but never see them, you get points as a provider I guess, but you fail at being a parent or spouse.
I would of waaaay rather of lived in a trailer, and grown up actually having a father around, instead of some distant workaholic male figure that is the "great provider" that allowed an upper middle class lifestyle.
For some I feel being far away making money to send home is the easy way out of having to actually be a parent.
... and by providing kids too much you actually spoil them easily and make... worse people out of them? or more likely they don't reach their potential as human beings, at least not that easily.
I mean, look around you, there are usually plenty of people who had it damn easy in life. this generates weakness. I am very happy I had to work my way up by myself, no cash cushion, no free apartment when turning 18 etc.it builds character to rely only on oneself, a priceless and one of most important lessons in life.
I say give kids good sporting equipment, give them free quality education (tricky bit in some places, but more expensive isn't automatically better for them), love them, support them and give them freedom, and you are excellent parent. rest is up to them.
Part of raising kids is providing them with the means to excel - good nutrition, education, clothing, etc. In our society, this equates to money.
While I understand it is not fair to trivialize a typical stay at home mother, it seems we've pushed the pendulum too far to the other side, where the typical working father is damned if he works a lot to pay the bills, and damned if he cuts down in order to take over more parenting duties. He's either a workaholic male or a deadbeat. Can't win.
And yes I realize that some two parent families have reversed gender roles, but the statistics still show the stay-at-home mother and working father are typical, at least in the US.
Although I don't work remotely, I'm happy that the tech/software industry seems to be one of the best industries for allowing people to work remotely. I would guess that this is influenced by the nature of our work, and the improvements in collaboration/communication/workflow applications.
Taking a 10-hour flight on a weekly basis would be too much for me, but then again he is the founder of an airline, so maybe he enjoys the flight!
This made me feel a little better about spending ~4hours a day on the bus commuting... always envy people who leave comments like "even 20 minutes is too long for me"
You know.. IMO you shouldn't and you should consider to relocate or change your job. There are probably towns / cities that allow for a great job and a great place of living close enough that you don't have to commute for 4 hours.
I have as of now, approx. 20 minutes with the subway which I think is kind of long. But in my new job (in the process of changing it) it will be less. At summer time I will be able to bike to work in about 20 minutes.
Also, it is a more meaningful place of work IMO. You can do that kind of change too.
Maybe it's just the beauty of being entry-level haha.... the stuff i'm working on is pretty interesting so I haven't really thought about about till recently, maybe i'll have to start thinking about it, thanks
I think SOME people enjoy the long commute to be away from family chores/responsibilities. If you have to make that LONG commute so that you can provide for the family and miss out on doing laundry or doing dishes, hey who's gonna complain?
You can love your family more than anyone else, but you still don't want to do the chores.
I would argue that not having a parent at home in the evening (because they are commuting) is the opposite of child-centric. Yes, they get a nice suburban home and parks, but what about parental bonding?