Sitting in commuter traffic can do all sorts of things to the psyche. One has time to reflect on life while behind the wheel of their vehicle for over an hour each day. It’s a sort of forced isolation. An education on patience. I used to ponder the inefficiency of it all. I used to try to avoid the insufferable Bay Area traffic. Try to find back roads. A different route home. A faster lane. Traffic made me mad and irritable. Then one day I said fuck it. The traffic is what it is and I won’t allow it to ruin my mood. When I decided to accept my lack of control over my situation is when I began to avoid the commute.

The twinkling red brake lights of countless random cars as anonymous as the stars in a night sky. The arrhythmic beat of your foot on the gas and brake pedal. Everyone in this modern phenomena is trying to get somewhere; yet it’s because we all want to go somewhere at the same time, means we all go nowhere, together.

It was sitting in this traffic on eastbound highway 24 just before the Caldecott Tunnels in 2011, when I began to think:

Is this really it? Get up early each morning. Grind out a living. Pay bills. Need more money. Do it again.

And I have to do this till I’m 65?

All of us have bought into this imperfect dream. Or else we wouldn’t go to work each day. Or save money and invest. Or buy a home. What is that dream? Part of it is survival. And that’s universal. We need money to live. But the other part of this dream is more than survival and different for everyone.

I consider myself lucky to have been born in San Francisco and live in California. This throbbing burning crossroads of good weather, gorgeous scenery, opportunity, tolerance, and innovation has always pulled people to this place. For both the good and bad, it’s now jam packed with varying economic hubs drawing more and more people. Tech. Universities. Major ports. Military bases. Life sciences. Big oil.

The labor union is strong here for a number of reasons, but mostly because everyone is building or retrofitting all the time. Housing for incoming residents. Offices for thriving business. Buildings for prestigious universities. Industry for manufacturers. It’s a cycle that I’ve benefited from as a carpenter and now a general contractor superintendent.

I directly benefit from the high population of the region; so how can I complain about the traffic that follows?

This commute that I hate feeds me. The commute pays me each week. The commute is helping me FIRE.

It’s quite a paradox. One I’ve mulled over again and again on the drive home.

The freeways are the arteries of my region. Pumping dollar infused blood back and forth in a frenzied inertia driven circle. Everyone is here to make money. That’s who fills up these freeways. People like me. People who want out. People who want in. It’s too lucrative to stay away. I could give up the commute, change careers, and work in my suburb city for 1/4 of my salary.

But I don’t. The money is too good with a San Francisco based company. Why should I ever complain about the commute? I should be welcoming it with open arms. Singing thanks to the FIRE gods for my good fortune in living and working in this economic hotspot at the edge of the country.

Funny enough it was the commute that made me snap one day in October of 2019 (I must report the acceptance of traffic doesn’t work everyday). After a particularly long day at work, it took one hour to go three blocks to get onto the bay bridge. I remember calling my wife telling her I was done. I didn’t know what I was going to do but commuting to San Francisco was not going to be it. If I had to change careers so be it. My wife was alarmed. I was alarmed. For once it didn’t feel worth it. I was getting the bad end of the deal.

Shortly thereafter I found out it was possible to retire early. I had all the ammunition I needed for motivation. Just the mere thought of long afternoons spent on the freeways are enough to make me check my spending and net worth again.

The commute has also been a source of education for me. These freeways became my classroom as I learned hour by hour about investing, personal finance, FIRE–among other subjects I love like history, travel, buddhism, and sailing.

Can a place where everyone wants to be really get around bad traffic? I look at other metropolitan areas around the country, LA, New York, Boston. All have their own traffic problems like the Bay Area.

Our system makes it so that we have to go to work each day. We have the freedom to pick where we work and where we live. We have the freedom to set the price of our homes for sale. The freedom to accept a salary or offer one. Is it really us with the freedom to choose or is it the market that chooses for us? It’s the free market system after all.

Why do we let ourselves price out everyday workers from living near their place of employment?

Why do we as a culture prioritize the car over public transportation?

There’s no right or wrong answer to any of those questions. We can just say the market created it nd the market enforces it.

Created what? This consumer culture? This late stage capitalism? Of all the outcomes that our modern society could create, we’ve chosen the path of mass consumption. I always like to look backwards down the dusty worn paths of history to see how we ended up here. If I don’t travel too far back, a big glaring time called World War Two sets the stage for today’s world. It’s not even the war but the end of the war that sets the stage for today.

Those wars across the oceans really did change life here in America.

Can you blame those soldiers coming back post war for wanting a simple home outside of the city with a few good things to make life convenient? Innocent sounding marvels like televisions and radios for entertainment, and maybe unbeknownst, to bring in consumer propaganda messages right into our homes? It wasn’t just those soldiers who wanted some nice things, but a society that just endured a long economic depression before war broke out. The American war machine turned its sights from destruction to production. The propaganda that played out during the war turned inwards.

The oft quoted economist Victor Lebow wrote a bunch about post war consumerism as it happened. He wrote an article titled “Price Competition in 1955“. He believed that we (the consumer) have been trained to want. Ever since televisions have been placed inside of our homes, we’ve welcomed inside our personal sanctuaries these corporations whose sole intent is to make as much profit as they can. We sit around with our family to listen and watch sales pitches every single day.

These are the roots that lead up to traffic. The creation of highways. The affordability of cars. The sprouting of suburbs. The billboards on the side of the road, on my screens, telling me, my grandparents, parents, kids, neighbors, what material thing or service will make them happier. We are constantly under assault by marketers to buy things. To buy things we have to work.

Did it have to be this way? Yeah, kinda. It’s not a perfect system. It’s that imperfect dream we’ve all bought into, well most of us anyway. If you’re looking to get out of the system early, then you might not be as sold as everyone else is on the “dream”.

What are the other systems that a society like ours could embrace? I think I know them. They’ve been tried out to varying success and failures. Free market capitalism is the winner for now.

Our consumerist mass consumption system is unavoidable. There is simply no other choice. Just like I can’t avoid my dreaded commute, you can’t avoid living in a consumer culture society. A society where price competition leads to mass production, leads to mass consumption, leads to having to work to earn money to spend.

Any romanticization of life being better or easier in another age is pure fantasy. This is the world we were born out of, not into, as my favorite Alan Watts liked to say. I’m writing this from my mass produced 1,900 square foot single family home, on a mass produced apple computer (made in China but designed in Cupertino, mind you). I’m sipping coffee made from beans grown in Ethiopia, in a cup that says made in China on the bottom. All of this stuff is resting on a mass produced table bought at Ikea. I’m wearing a mass produced North Face jacket. I have mass produced Nike slip on sandals on my feet. You might be reading this on a mass produced device.

I see what other people own. Other people see what I own. Then we get blasted by expert propaganda messages designed to trick our most base human emotions into believing the message that we want or need an item or service.

Where would we be without our consumerist free market system? It would be an entirely different world. Maybe not better. Maybe better. My dreamer self wants to believe the latter.

Every material product I have, my neighbor could easily have the exact same thing! A few doors down my exact home layout exists. A fellow citizen across the country on the east coast could have my exact same set up, minus the home layout. Everyone has what everyone else does, or at least, has the opportunity to have what that the other person does. And that is it right there; it’s the opportunity, the possibility to have what other people have that keeps consumerism thriving. That’s what keeps the imperfect dream alive. It keeps the commute alive. And in turn my paycheck.

Most everyone I’m stuck commuting with is doing the exact same thing. We work. We pay taxes. We are all just trying to make it in a world where the rules and starting points have been set before we were born. It’s not easy pursuing an imperfect dream. The want to be successful. The struggle of accepting things we don’t completely agree with. The false thought that things might be better when we have more money or when work is optional.

Maybe one day when humans live a different way, historians will study our way of life in this age and the phenomena of commuter traffic. They’ll wonder about the nameless people who made up these jams on the roads. Wonder about their lives and why they chose to participate in such a dreadful looking daily activity.

Even today, 14 years after the day I began to question it all on highway 24, I still find myself asking that question on the same exact freeway. It feels almost like nothing has changed except for a few greying hairs. I ask myself:

Is this really it? Get up early each morning. Grind out a living. Pay bills. Need more money. Do it again. And I have to do this till I’m 65?

Except now, my forty something self knows the answer: Yes, this really is it. But I’ve found the secret early exit from this freeway. The off ramp is coming up, better get over into the slow lane...

---

What are your thoughts?

You can now buy me a coffee if the blog brings you any kind of value. This will help offset the bluehost fees of running the blog. Also, this is how I track my net worth and spending all in one app* (affiliate link).