[hinkley]

Speaking as a child subjected to routine 2 hour road trips each way (often coming back the next day, once in a while the same day) and occasionally much longer road trips:

Stop the damned car and let your family out for fuck's sake.

Just because you can drive >4 hours nonstop doesn't mean you should drive 4 hours nonstop (I did on a solo road trip earlier this year. I forgot a piece of equipment and didn't realize until I was 5 miles out of town, so I had to 'make up time'. It was still a mistake.) Complaining that you can't drive 6 hours nonstop is some form of insanity that I am not qualified to diagnose.

[jcranmer]

Do you find lasting an entire Boston-SF flight without getting out of your seat "some form of insanity"? Because that's basically the same sort of situation as the 6 hour nonstop drive (although the car seats are probably more comfortable than airline seats).

[jjeaff]

Yes, if I couldn't even get up out of my seat, walk around, and go to the bathroom, I would consider that some form of insanity and/or torture.

[kmonsen]

Seriously?? You call that torture? The spoiled lives we lead here in the west truly makes us not realize hard realities. I can promise you that torture is way more unpleasant than sitting in the airline seat with your nice noise cancelling headphones and watching a netflix show on an ipad. Even as a over 6 feet person I did way more unpleasant stuff in the army compared to sitting a few hours in an airplane seat.

[jjeaff]

Calm down now, it's called hyperbole. You will encounter it a lot, especially online, so don't take everything you read literally.

Also, we are talking 6 hours, not "a few". And depending on your height, seat recline, and problems with lower back pain, you can bet for some people, 6 hours unable to stand up can be quite painful. Not, "bamboo shoots under your fingernails painful" but not something anyone would want to go through.

For me, the claustrophobia of not being able to stand up would be quite terrible.

[justrudd]

If I'm traveling with someone, I'll stop every 2/3 hours. But if I'm by myself (and was still in my 20s)? I'm going to optimize every second (Gatorade bottles FTW). No reason other than to say I did...

[hinkley]

Done that plenty myself, but eventually I figured out that being sedentary that long starts to affect my alertness.

Getting out of the car and getting the blood pumping makes me much more alert for the next hour or two. At first I didn't want to think about that meant about how alert I wasn't for the previous hour. Now it's kind of hard to ignore.

[Diederich]

Are you ok?

[hinkley]

How many of us really are...

You see so many people in interesting jobs that have an origin story of something that happened to them, a friend, a sibling or neighbor when they were a kid. I just write software, so my stories are perhaps a bit less compelling than the oncologist down the block.