Traditional commuting would fade away if we worked just four-hours each day

“Commuting”, as it is traditionally understood, would fade away if the Four-Hour Work Day became a reality.

With workers needing only to be at their respective workplaces for four hours each day, they would live quite close and so to get to and from their work in just minutes, either by foot or on a bicycle.

The idea of commuting is considered by The Book of Life in a piece entitled “On Commuting” in a section called The Sorrows of Work.

“Entering the carriage feels like interrupting a congregation. The cold air cuts into daydreams which must have begun far up the line.

“The settled passengers neither look up nor give any other overt sign of taking notice, but they betray their awareness of any new arrival by dextrously readjusting their limbs to allow them to struggle past them to one of the remaining unoccupied seats.

“The train moves off, resuming its rhythmical clicking along tracks laid down a century and a half ago, when the capital first began plucking workers from their beds in faraway villages,” the piece says in talking about commuting by train.