I Will Never Commute Again

...so long as I can help it

A couple of weeks ago, I woke up at about five o’clock in the morning, 15 minutes earlier than my usual 5:15am alarm, so that I could catch the first pitch of the 2025 Major League Baseball season.

The Los Angeles Dodgers and my Chicago Cubs were facing off in the Tokyo Series, a two-game set featuring some of baseball’s brightest Japanese stars. The game started at 7:10pm local time in Tokyo, and I was able to catch some of it as I read my Bible in the morning.

Around 6:45am, my almost-five-year-old daughter Maggie woke up and joined me in the living room. Daisy, our 18-month old was sleeping later than normal. At about two minutes to 7am, I woke up Susie, my wife, and asked her to take over so that I could grab a coffee refill, my breakfast protein shake, and walk out to my shed in the backyard to begin the workday.

I usually begin the workday around 7am and try to end around 4pm, with an hour lunch break reserved for going to the gym or for a walk in the middle of the day if my schedule allows. Sometimes my meetings stack through the middle of the day, so I need to front- or back-load a workout before I start or after I finish for the day.

On this day, the weather was beautiful and my schedule was open, so I took a midday walk at a park beside my neighborhood, listening to a combination of a Tim Keller sermon for first half of the walk and my Paramore artist playlist on Spotify for the second half. Midday walks are always preferred to midday gym time, but gym workouts tend to be more intense and cardiovascularly “productive” than beautiful walks at the park…unfortunately.

Anyway, I logged off a few minutes earlier that day because Susie needed to take Maggie to music class and stick around to participate, so I was on Daisy duty. The day was still beautiful, so I loaded Daisy in the stroller and we walked the same 3.4 mile circuit I had walked earlier in the day. Daisy kicked her feet, snacked on Goldfish, and waved at the many passers-by who had the same idea we had to walk the park.

At about the three-mile mark of our walk, which has us in the deepest part of a cul-de-sac whose houses’ backyards collide with our own, I looked around, thinking of how grateful I am for getting to take my daughter for a walk immediately after clocking out for the day.

I thought to myself:

I will never commute to an office again…so long as I can help it.

And then we went home so I could work on our dinner (I’m the main chef in the family)—which was just leftovers that day—before our community group members made their way to our house.

Of course, there are a couple possible caveats and clarifications for this revelation I had:

1. By “commute” I mean something like I used to do before 2020—a 30+ minute commute three or more times per week. Of course I would make a short or occasional commute if necessary.

2. As demonstrated by “…so long as I can help it,” I would obviously commute 45 minutes five times per week if it was the only viable option I had to provide for my family.

So what I mean by my decision to never commute to an office again is that I cannot envision any scenario in which I could willfully decide that a job is worth leaving my family before they awake, sitting on the highway for 45+ minutes each way, getting home just in time for dinner, snagging a bit of time with the girls before bed, and doing it all over again the next day.

Avoiding that commuter lifestyle in favor of the more present lifestyle I’ve outlined above—getting time with my girls in the morning and as soon as I clock out for the day—is worth tens of thousands of dollars in annual salary to me. Seriously. And that’s not even accounting for the actual costs of commuting (gas, car maintenance, etc.) that we currently keep quite low given our circumstances.

We can pay the mortgage on our modest, but wonderful, home. We live next to a park with over 100 acres of land, playgrounds, walking trails in the woods, a river, and so much more. We order takeout more than we should, but we make it work. Our local church community is tightly-knit and cares deeply for one another. We don’t take as many vacations as Susie would like—I, the homebody, am to blame for this—but we have everything we could want for ourselves and our girls.

We’re five years into the world post-COVID now, and in just about a week, Maggie will celebrate her fifth birthday. I have a very different perspective on what role my career plays in my life than I did before I became a parent who works from home. I still see my career as a means of working out my calling and stewarding well the gifts that God has given me, but it has taken a backseat to the kind of lifestyle I currently experience with my family.

To put a bit of a point on it, I filter all major life decisions or opportunities through a sort of lens, asking the following question, “How will this decision promote or inhibit my ability to steward all that God has given me for his glory and the good of other people?”

And, best as I can tell, there are few scenarios in which sitting in a car for two hours per day multiple times per week promotes rather than inhibits the stewardship of all God has given me.