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Everyone On Earth Has The Same Commute.
Everyone On Earth Has The Same Commute.
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Subtitles (150)
0:00
If you’ve ever watched “day in my life” videos from people who
0:02
live in other parts of the world, you know how different those 24 hours can be.
0:07
Sure, we all spend some time eating, sleeping, and on hygiene.
0:11
All that is universal because, well…biology.
0:14
But you might imagine that the similarities end there.
0:17
As it turns out, though, there’s something else that all humans
0:20
appear to have in common, regardless of culture or geography.
0:23
Everyone on Earth spends roughly the same amount of time commuting.
0:28
And the oddly precise number of minutes tells us something about ourselves.
0:32
[♪ INTRO]
0:36
For decades, researchers have wanted to
0:38
understand how humans spend their time.
0:40
And getting a handle on that has been harder than you might think.
0:43
Economists, historians, anthropologists, and sociologists have all studied
0:48
how we spend our allotted 24 hours,
0:51
and haven’t gotten all that close to the big conclusions that people want.
0:55
Because even though so many researchers have explored this question,
0:58
each of those research disciplines tend to focus on just a slice of the pie,
1:03
using methods that make it really difficult to combine results across studies.
1:07
Plus, most of the studies are done at the national level,
1:10
using metrics and categories that are relevant to that country,
1:14
but are less useful when you want to compare countries
1:16
with different levels of wealth or different lifestyles.
1:19
Also, there are 8 billion people in the world,
1:22
and trying to say anything about what 8 billion people do is really hard.
1:28
While this question might sound a bit….
1:30
Well silly, figuring out what the heck we all do with our 24 hours does matter.
1:35
We live in a global world, where our systems for things
1:39
like food and clothing are connected on an international scale.
1:43
And, some of the biggest threats to society,
1:45
like climate change and biodiversity loss,
1:48
are the product of the global total of human activities.
1:52
Likewise, our ability to counteract them is going to rely on a lot of collective
1:56
global action, which is limited by how much time we have in our collective day.
2:01
Right now, across all the people in the world,
2:04
we have roughly 190 billion hours per day.
2:07
Which is a lot, but it’s also a finite amount of time.
2:10
Which means we have to make some choices
2:12
and prioritize some efforts over others.
2:15
So in 2023, a group of researchers set out to determine
2:18
what they called the global human day.
2:21
They combined data from 145 countries collected from 2000 to 2019.
2:27
They intentionally cut it off before COVID,
2:29
because I think we can all agree that what we
2:32
did all day during the pandemic wasn’t exactly typical.
2:35
I’m looking at you, Tiger King.
2:37
The researchers used various techniques to account for different ages
2:40
and missing data, and came up with an accounting
2:43
of how global society spends our time.
2:46
So, for example, how many of those 190 billion hours in a day are spent
2:51
on food prep globally, and then figuring out what that would
2:54
average out to in an internationally-average 24-hour day.
2:58
54 minutes per day, by the way. Some of the activities showed a lot of variation.
3:01
Like, growing and collecting food takes up more than an hour a day
3:04
in some low-income countries, and less than
3:07
5 minutes a day in many high-income countries.
3:09
But other activities were incredibly consistent
3:12
across countries and across two decades.
3:15
And one of the weirder ones was travel time.
3:17
To be clear, this isn’t just driving to and from work.
3:21
It’s all of the personal travel you do in a day–commuting to work,
3:25
yes, but also running errands, driving to social events, all of that.
3:30
In 2025, the researchers dug further into this travel time thing,
3:34
and found that regardless of the wealth of the country,
3:37
the population average of travel time was 78 minutes.
3:41
And the margin of error was only 12 minutes,
3:44
which means there wasn’t a ton of variability.
3:46
Since you could spend anywhere from five minutes to five hours or more on travel,
3:50
it seems weird that so many of us all around the world converge at 78 minutes.
3:56
Though, this is a population average per country included in the study.
4:01
Individuals in each of these countries might
4:03
have more variance in their travel times.
4:05
Pour one out for those poor souls who responded that they spend
4:08
more than 5 hours a day commuting.
4:11
I work from home. I’m not built for that life.
4:13
What’s weirder still is that the average time traveled
4:16
has no correlation with average distance traveled.
4:20
Some populations traveled less than 10 kilometers per day,
4:23
and others trekked more than 150 kilometers per day.
4:27
The mode of travel also doesn’t matter: walking, driving, taking a bus.
4:32
It all shakes out to 78 minutes, give or take.
4:36
Which makes you wonder what it is about 78 minutes.
4:40
But before we get to that, here’s a quick ad break.
4:43
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4:45
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4:48
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4:56
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5:01
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5:04
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5:06
But when that stuff goes the other way, it can be deadly.
5:09
And too many people die because they
5:11
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5:15
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5:17
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5:24
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5:31
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5:33
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5:37
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5:41
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5:44
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5:48
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5:51
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5:55
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5:59
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6:01
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6:04
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6:06
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6:20
The fact that there’s a convergence point on our travel time makes sense–
6:24
too much travel tires us out and takes away from other activities.
6:28
So it would make sense that less travel time is better.
6:31
But according to the researchers, that’s not the only driving force here.
6:34
Instead, they proposed that the lower limit is also a factor,
6:38
and that it comes from a psychological need for people to go out and explore,
6:42
to stretch their legs, and be exposed to a complex environment.
6:46
Like, if you think about our hunter-gatherer days,
6:48
we probably wouldn’t have been able to hunt
6:50
or gather all that much if we stayed at home all day.
6:53
But this commute convergence is more than just a fun fact.
6:56
It could really be useful as we think about addressing things
7:00
like global energy consumption and how that impacts climate change.
7:04
Here’s an example.
7:05
Between 1975 and 2002, the energy efficiency of European cars
7:10
drastically improved, enough that we would have expected to see
7:14
a significant decrease in energy usage based on typical driving habits.
7:18
But instead, with more efficient cars, people started driving more and farther.
7:24
For instance, in Germany, the distance travelled per person went from
7:28
25 km per day to 38 km per day, so energy expenditure actually increased.
7:34
There’s a key lesson here for making a more eco-friendly world.
7:38
As we try to make travel more energy efficient,
7:41
we need to consider how much energy is consumed per hour,
7:45
not per kilometer, which is how we’ve traditionally thought about it.
7:48
Like, an electric bus and an electric car both
7:51
use the same amount of energy per kilometer per person.
7:54
So you could argue that building more bus lanes and building
7:57
specialized lanes for electric cars would provide the same benefits
8:01
in terms of energy consumption, before you factor in
8:04
the number of riders per vehicle, anyway.
8:06
But the cars use almost twice as much energy per hour,
8:10
meaning that buses are actually the more energy-efficient
8:13
place for transit infrastructure investment.
8:15
As technology develops, we can use everyone’s consistent travel time
8:20
to figure out which tech is better at reducing energy per kilometer,
8:24
helping us make climate strides that’ll have lasting impacts,
8:27
no matter how fast our electric cars get.
8:29
Just something fun to think about on your next commute.
8:32
[♪ OUTRO]
