On The Road

I spend 2 hours a day commuting back and forth from work. In a given month, that’s 40 hours of nonstop driving. In a given year, that’s close to 500 hours spent with arms stretched, shoulders tense, eyes glazed and strained on the road ahead. At 60 miles-per-hour, that’s 30,000 miles a year, or greater than the entire circumference of the earth (24,901 miles).

I would gladly sign up for a yearlong road trip around the globe, starting in San Francisco and making my way north to Oregon, Washington, through Canada and straight up into Alaska. I’d take an Icebreaker across the Bearing Strait, car in tow, and fish for salmon off the stern as we traveled the short 51 miles of open ocean across the Bering Sea to Russia. I found an old box set of Russian language tapes for five bucks at a garage sale about fifteen years ago. I’d be sure to bring them with. Ya hachoo soopa. “I will have the soup.”

Thirty thousand miles should equate, if only in some symbolic way, to knowledge, to lessons learned, to added value. Instead, it simply equates to another year of depreciation and maintenance costs. Ok, so the car is worth less, but are we worth more? Does our value increase as we grow older? We may be worth more to our company, but are we worth more to ourselves? I’d argue that if we truly felt the potential for our worth, we would take more risks, like the men who settled the colonies, or the families who settled the West. I’m sure fear was somewhere in the melting pot of their emotions, but they acted anyways. They realized their potential for more, so they uprooted their lives and with faithful action they seized upon the pinnacle opportunity of their day. Freedom.

What is the pinnacle opportunity of our day? It’s still freedom, though I feel that for the bulk of my adulthood I’ve been pigeonholed into a series of choices that has resulted in a pair of golden handcuffs being placed firmly around my wrists. I have mortgaged my freedom for the opportunity to conform to some normative existence fueled by Visa, Mastercard, and American Express. I work in a job that in so many ways I didn’t choose. It chose me. My relationships are a result of convenience and geographical proximity. My obligations, responsibilities, and monthly expenses keep my choices limited to three simple tasks: work, eat, sleep.

So, I work long hours, I cook elaborate meals, and I sleep until noon on Sundays. I will drive 30,000 miles this year, but I will display no marked progress save for an added inch around my midsection, an added wrinkle beneath each eye, and a trivially inadequate contribution to my retirement account. In the 900,000 miles I am expected to commute in order to successfully reach retirement age, I will have successfully traversed that same flat terrain without ever having gotten my life out of second gear. I will have given my life to another man’s vision, and traded my time for an inadequate hill of beans.

A study of 2,000 Americans over the age of 25 examined how they value their time, and the average person thinks their time on a task that feels like work is worth $15.63 an hour. Over a 30-year career, that would amount to $975,000 in gross earnings. After monthly expenses, taxes, and general material mismanagement, that’s hardly enough to survive much less retire on. But $15.63 is what we are willing to trade our time for every day. It’s the price at which we are willing to fork over our freedom.

The fog is lifting, and the clarity achieved with each year of living has me reconsidering my life. Call it a midlife crisis, but I’m not content to live in a country where freedom is on sale for less than a bag of kibble. I’m not content to settle for $15.63, and I don’t think anyone else should be either.

After traversing the Ural Mountains, I would head due west towards Moscow. I’ve been to Moscow once before, but I was too young to appreciate it. Isn’t that the irony of life? We are always a bit too young and a bit too ignorant to appreciate things as they happen. Or, we come to appreciate the wrong things. That appreciation is really a reluctant concession that results in a nation valuing their time at $15.63 an hour.

The monthly minimum wage in Russia is 12,130 rubles, or $196. The average monthly cost to live in Russia is $253. That’s 1.3x the minimum monthly wage.

Minimum wage in the United States is $7.25/hour. Working full time, that’s $15,080 per year, or $1256 per month. The median necessary living wage in the United States is $67,690 per year, or $5640 per month. That’s 4.5x the minimum wage.

But what value do you place on your time? Would you trade 30 years of your life for a million dollars? Ten million? I can tell people I wouldn’t trade the next 30 years of my life for anything, and yet I do it every day out of need. When I could be driving…due west out of Moscow, en route to Western Europe and the Andalusians, south across the Strait of Gibraltar towards Morocco… The value of our time is equal to the value of the solitary thought that either adheres us to conformity or inspires us towards conscious change.