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If you've ever watched "day in my life" videos from people who live in other parts of the world, you know how different those 24 hours can be. Sure, we all spend some time eating, sleeping, and on hygiene. All that is universal because, well…biology. But you might imagine that the similarities end there. As it turns out, though, there's something else that all humans appear to have in common, regardless of culture or geography. Everyone on Earth spends roughly the same amount of time commuting. And the oddly precise number of minutes tells us something about ourselves.
[♪ INTRO] For decades, researchers have wanted to understand how humans spend their time. And getting a handle on that has been harder than you might think. Economists, historians, anthropologists, and sociologists have all studied how we spend our allotted 24 hours, and haven't gotten all that close to the big conclusions that people want. Because even though so many researchers have explored this question, each of those research disciplines tend to focus on just a slice of the pie, using methods that make it really difficult to combine results across studies.
Plus, most of the studies are done at the national level, using metrics and categories that are relevant to that country, but are less useful when you want to compare countries with different levels of wealth or different lifestyles. Also, there are 8 billion people in the world, and trying to say anything about what 8 billion people do is really hard. While this question might sound a bit…. Well silly, figuring out what the heck we all do with our 24 hours does matter. We live in a global world, where our systems for things like food and clothing are connected on an international scale. And, some of the biggest threats to society,
like climate change and biodiversity loss, are the product of the global total of human activities. Likewise, our ability to counteract them is going to rely on a lot of collective global action, which is limited by how much time we have in our collective day. Right now, across all the people in the world, we have roughly 190 billion hours per day. Which is a lot, but it's also a finite amount of time. Which means we have to make some choices and prioritize some efforts over others. So in 2023, a group of researchers set out to determine what they called the global human day. They combined data from 145 countries collected from 2000 to 2019.
They intentionally cut it off before COVID, because I think we can all agree that what we did all day during the pandemic wasn't exactly typical. I'm looking at you, Tiger King. The researchers used various techniques to account for different ages and missing data, and came up with an accounting of how global society spends our time. So, for example, how many of those 190 billion hours in a day are spent on food prep globally, and then figuring out what that would average out to in an internationally-average 24-hour day.
54 minutes per day, by the way. Some of the activities showed a lot of variation. Like, growing and collecting food takes up more than an hour a day in some low-income countries, and less than 5 minutes a day in many high-income countries. But other activities were incredibly consistent across countries and across two decades. And one of the weirder ones was travel time. To be clear, this isn't just driving to and from work. It's all of the personal travel you do in a day-commuting to work, yes, but also running errands, driving to social events, all of that. In 2025, the researchers dug further into this travel time thing, and found that regardless of the wealth of the country,
the population average of travel time was 78 minutes. And the margin of error was only 12 minutes, which means there wasn't a ton of variability. Since you could spend anywhere from five minutes to five hours or more on travel, it seems weird that so many of us all around the world converge at 78 minutes. Though, this is a population average per country included in the study. Individuals in each of these countries might have more variance in their travel times. Pour one out for those poor souls who responded that they spend more than 5 hours a day commuting.
I work from home. I'm not built for that life. What's weirder still is that the average time traveled has no correlation with average distance traveled. Some populations traveled less than 10 kilometers per day, and others trekked more than 150 kilometers per day. The mode of travel also doesn't matter: walking, driving, taking a bus. It all shakes out to 78 minutes, give or take. Which makes you wonder what it is about 78 minutes. But before we get to that, here's a quick ad break.
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Typically appointments made through Zocdoc happen within 24 - 72 hours of booking. You can even score same-day appointments. So you can stop putting off those doctors appointments and go to Zocdoc.com/SCISHOW to find and instantly book a top-rated doctor today. The fact that there's a convergence point on our travel time makes sense- too much travel tires us out and takes away from other activities. So it would make sense that less travel time is better. But according to the researchers, that's not the only driving force here.
Instead, they proposed that the lower limit is also a factor, and that it comes from a psychological need for people to go out and explore, to stretch their legs, and be exposed to a complex environment. Like, if you think about our hunter-gatherer days, we probably wouldn't have been able to hunt or gather all that much if we stayed at home all day. But this commute convergence is more than just a fun fact. It could really be useful as we think about addressing things like global energy consumption and how that impacts climate change.
Here's an example. Between 1975 and 2002, the energy efficiency of European cars drastically improved, enough that we would have expected to see a significant decrease in energy usage based on typical driving habits. But instead, with more efficient cars, people started driving more and farther. For instance, in Germany, the distance travelled per person went from 25 km per day to 38 km per day, so energy expenditure actually increased. There's a key lesson here for making a more eco-friendly world. As we try to make travel more energy efficient, we need to consider how much energy is consumed per hour, not per kilometer, which is how we've traditionally thought about it.
Like, an electric bus and an electric car both use the same amount of energy per kilometer per person. So you could argue that building more bus lanes and building specialized lanes for electric cars would provide the same benefits in terms of energy consumption, before you factor in the number of riders per vehicle, anyway. But the cars use almost twice as much energy per hour, meaning that buses are actually the more energy-efficient place for transit infrastructure investment. As technology develops, we can use everyone's consistent travel time to figure out which tech is better at reducing energy per kilometer, helping us make climate strides that'll have lasting impacts, no matter how fast our electric cars get.
Just something fun to think about on your next commute. [♪ OUTRO]
