Idle thoughts about the record happiness levels of Finland:
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Idle thoughts about the record happiness levels of Finland:
At least some of it has to be the fact that little children can just toddle home from school, dancing across the side walk obviously in some kind of animated game with their friends, before splitting up to go to their individual homes... Instead of both them and their parents being stuck in a car ferrying them across whatever distances, stuck in traffic, instead of doing absolutely anything else. -
I've seen references to studies finding that a long commute greatly decreases happiness and quality of life.
Specifically, that when people buy a suburban house and go from a 5-10 minute commute to a 30+ minute commute, their satisfaction actually goes down. The long commute prevents spending time with friends or co-workers near their job, and sucks time away from home life too.
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@Kathmandu Sounds about right. Commuting on a train is presumably less unhappiness because you can read, go have something in the restaurant car, etc. Not so when driving generally
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@sinituulia @Kathmandu you have restaurant cars on the commuters trains??? :8O:
but yeah, on a train you can do a lot of things that help make commute time back into your own time
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@valhalla The commuter trains are just repurposed old as balls general purpose big trains! They often have the little cafe car still on there, presumably because you don't need a lot of equipment to microwave heavily marked up frozen pastries or very expensive plain coffee and it's a lot of revenue and people really like them? Just a little kiosk and some seating, a lot of people just buy coffee or tea and go back to their seats.
But they're definitely not all new or nice, and sometimes the carriage composition changes according to what's broken or getting cleaned up that day, and the air conditioning is either there or not...
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@sinituulia here commuter trains tend to be either new or old commuter trains, designed to carry as many people as possible in as little space as possible, so I guess that they never had that kind of equipment in the first place
also, a Finnish person I've met who had seen Italian commuter trains mentioned that we have a very different idea of “this train is full” than the one that is common in Finland.
Let's just say that during rush hour getting to a kiosk (or anything else on the train) and back to your seat may not exactly be an option, at least not when you're still close to Milan :D
