The secrets of the world's happiest cities
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
But one group of commuters report enjoying themselves. These are people who travel under their own steam [...] They walk. They run. They ride bicycles.
Completely matches my experience, and it's astonishing how strong the effect is.
It is what I use, summer and winter, in the Swedish countryside. While these older bikes might not be the epitome of efficiency (which is part of the reason why I'm trying to convert one to wood gas - plenty of wood here) they are easy to fix and a lot more fun than many other self-propelling vehicles. When it rains your clothes get wet, when it snows they get white. So what? When it is cold you dress up, when warm you do the opposite.
You might think this is impractical. You're probably right. Sometimes you have to trade in some efficiency and practicality for other, less tangible benefits.
You get to where you're going and in my experience you just kind of have a blah feeling.
Where as if you get on a bike to go somewhere not only is the trip there enjoyable(provided the route is not overrun by hordes of car zombies~), but when you get there you're nearly guaranteed to be in a good mood. Like "Alright, yeah let's do this!"
~even then though, it's hard to not enjoy a bike ride.
A car somehow alleviates those concerns?
There's no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing.
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"You're talking about people who"
I was saying that when I choose between car or bike, it is most often going to be bike.
I wasn't making any broad prescriptions for society, but if I were to...
Caveats: Good winter tires are expensive, the magic isn't the spikes but the rubber. Be careful when you step off the bicycle, you have no clue how slippery it is. After bicycling a while with winter tires you can't bicycle without them, you lose all reflexes for handling slippery ice.
This is probably helped by the fact that the activity of riding a motorcycle is much more demanding than some other forms of transport this mainly because of all the cars that are actively trying to assassinate you daily!
Because of this focus it is much easier and actually important to let go of work-related things!
If I'm walking or biking somewhere, especially anywhere work-related, it feels so damn good. If I know that in the past I'd have been doing it in a car, it feels twice as good. If I see lots of other people in cars trying to do the same thing, I have the moral problem of trying to control my schadenfreude.
The one exception I'd make for automated vehicles, but it's only a partial exception, is trains. As someone once quoted on HN: "Everybody hates buses and everybody loves trains." Trains don't have the quality of walking or bicycling, but they have some other lesser quality that still feels pretty good. Well, maybe motorcycles and trains are tied for second. :)
"He explained it by way of a story: sometimes, he said, he would pick up his three-year-old son from nursery and put him on the back seat of his tandem bike and they would pedal home along the South Saskatchewan river. The snow would muffle the noise of the city. Dusk would paint the sky in colours so exquisite that Judge could not begin to find names for them. The snow would reflect those hues. It would glow like the sky, and Judge would breathe in the cold air and hear his son breathing behind him, and he would feel as though together they had become part of winter itself."
I've been reading The Wisdom of Insecurity, and this is a central theme that Watts discusses - the idea of being separate and removed from nature. He argues that the isolation of the self from the surroundings causes stress and insecurity . Somehow, this article is hinting towards the same concept, but from a different perspective. I wonder how in other ways we can improve our society by increasing human joy that come from experiential happiness as opposed to purely pursuing industrial optimization and efficiency.
In addition to bemoaning that intangible, but nonetheless real, loss. There has been recent study of the detrimental effects of light pollution on the creatures that share the planet with us.
I think this is representative of an issue that is an underlying cause of a lot of modern chronic stresses. Our disrespect for all the life on earth and to future generations of that life, especially of our own species, by our falling down on the job of our stewardship of the planet.
Now that's a tall order to rectify, but if our collective actions can result in emergent effects that are detrimental to our societal and planetary health, the opposite is possible as well.
opposed to purely pursuing industrial optimization and efficiency.
Not to take away from your general point at all, but I think the above is just something a lot of people tell themselves or that is assumed but the evidence for it is not actually there.
Similarly, there seems to be a lot of, "Well, we have to do X, because we have to do Y." Where Y is not something that actually has to be done.
I think a lot of things just develop a kind of inertia and go from there. Cars for example in their overbuiltness and overuse are about the farthest thing from efficient and optimized, especially when you factor in their impact on the environment, destruction of human life, and general unpleasantness.
To your second point, I wasn't implying that we're even that efficient or optimized as a society - we hugely discount the negative externalities of our actions like you mentioned. What bothers me is the mentality surrounding it all. The Einstein quote pops into mind - "Confusion of goals and perfection of means seems, in my opinion, to characterize our age." In that sense, we are relentless in our pursuit of the next hot thing without asking ourselves what it will do for our collective happiness and joy in 10, 20, or god forbid 100 years from now.
The other reason it's surprising, I think, is that while being indoors all day sucks, it's a kind of suckage you don't realize till it's fixed. When I used to stay indoors all day, I'd find myself constantly in a bad mood but not know why. It's kind of like socializing for introverts. As an immature introvert I didn't think I needed social interaction till I was virtually starved of it.
But then again, he works outside much of the day. I think what this really boils down to is people getting sick of being confined inside spaces (office, car) at all times.