How much influence does where you live have on your life, career and achievements? Much bigger than you think.
It's not just about the price of the apartment, the square footage or the prestige of the district. Just about the location. Where you live affects:
who do you spend time with
how often do you leave home
how much energy you have
what opportunities come into your life,
and even your mental health.
And interestingly, many studies show that a huge part of this impact comes down to one simple constraint: people organize their lives around commute times.
Our brain thinks in 30 minutes for some reason
There is such a thing as the Marchetti Constant*.
It shows that people all over the world, regardless of era, culture, wealth or means of transport, organize their lives around a 30-minute one-way trip, which means they are able to devote about an hour a day to commuting.
And no matter what we use, it works everywhere: on foot, on horseback, by bike, by train or by car. Faster transport only translates into a larger area of the city we use, but the travel time itself remains almost identical.
Moreover, people gradually adapt their lifestyles to their circumstances in such a way that the average travel time remains more or less constant. Which means that...
*It's called the Marchetti Constant, even though it was discovered in the 1970s by Yacov Zahavi, an engineer at the US Transportation Agency. 15 years later, the Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti described it in his work "Anthropological Invariants in Travel Behavior", which he greatly popularized and ultimately took over this discovery with his name. Which only proves that popularizers, not discoverers, usually benefit most from discoveries. Right, Mr. Edison?
The 30 minutes around you define your life
If people naturally primarily use what is within half an hour of their home, this has a key impact on their lives. Yours too.
Within 30 minutes you will build relationships, meet business partners, go to training, restaurants, friends and events. There you will accidentally bump into people who define your life.
If you live close to ambitious people, interesting companies, good energy, events, sports, culture or entrepreneurship, you will naturally benefit from it. Without much effort. This will start to seep into your everyday life.
It's really brutally simple:
You use the potential of your 30-minute environment.
If something is further away, it simply ceases to be part of everyday life. Your brain will rewire itself.
This is why where you live is the silent architect of success or stagnation.
What if I have more than 30 minutes?
Even if theoretically "you only have an hour to do something", psychologically further things start to disappear.
An hour's commute to something worthwhile sounds reasonable in theory. In practice, after a few months:
you go out less often
you meet new people less often
you're less likely to run into deals
you will choose comfort and routine more often
Your life will become more closed and predictable
And this is not due to laziness. It's just how humans work.
Research also shows that long commutes correlate with:
higher level of stress,
lower life satisfaction,
worse mental health,
less time for relationships and regeneration.
So where to live?
In the era of such advanced technology, it is easy to believe that location is no longer important to our lives - but economists have been researching the so-called "agglomeration effects", which shows the opposite.
The most productive and innovative places in the world still rely on physical proximity to people. That is why large cities, despite high costs, still attract ambitious people.
For this reason, it is worth choosing your place of residence consciously and asking yourself an uncomfortable question:
Do I really need a bigger house 60 minutes away from the life I want to lead?
Is it better to have a smaller apartment in the right place that will give you more opportunities, relationships, mental health, energy and opportunities than a big house on the outskirts?
People often look at real estate solely as a financial asset or status symbol. Meanwhile, the place of residence is primarily a tool for designing everyday life. And everyday life builds life.
If you want to develop your business, it is worth living close to people from whom you can learn and with whom you can create something. If you want to be healthier, it is worth living close to places that support exercise and regeneration. If you want to build relationships, it is worth living in a place where relationships develop naturally.
The environment always influences people more than they think. For thousands of years, cities have developed around this truth. Today we are still subject to it, even if we no longer notice it.
----- HELLO TO THE CURIOUS NERDS -----
What should a city be like?
Aristotle answered the question 2,300 years ago in a surprisingly modern way.
According to him, the city should be:
Big enough to be self-sufficient,
At the same time, small enough for citizens to actually participate in the life of the community.
.
This is not a coincidence. Our brains evolved in a world of local communities. For most of human history, everything important was close by: work, relationships, trade, knowledge, community, and threats. And it has been constant for thousands of years:
Therefore, most pre-industrial cities could be walked in just a few dozen minutes. Historically, cities stopped growing in area when they reached the 30-minute travel limit.
But later it started to change. And probably not for the better.
Capitalism has changed the nature of cities
“Never before in recorded history had such vast masses of people lived in such savagely deteriorated environment, ugly in form, debased in content.”
Lewis Mumford
Over the previous thousands of years, cities had grown slowly, according to geography and natural human needs.
In the 17th century, the explosion of maritime trade led to a huge concentration of wealth in the port cities of Europe. Now wealthy landowners began purchasing vast tracts of land and developing them wholesale, ignoring everything else except maximizing profit. For the first time in history, systematic violations began Marchetti constant
Lewis Mumford summed it up brutally: “The nature and purpose of the city have been completely forgotten.”
Land speculation worsened the situation
In the 19th century, land trading became more profitable than the trade that had previously fueled urban growth. People bought land only to sell it for a higher price. Undeveloped land became worth 50-100 times more than it had been a hundred years earlier. It was then that the word "millionaire" was coined and initially it was not a compliment.
The problem was that housing prices were rising faster than the quality of life. In the Middle Ages, housing consumed about 10% of a worker's income, and food consumed about 50%. Therefore, even the increase in food prices caused protests and was one of the factors leading to the French Revolution.
Industrialization lowered food prices, but at the same time land speculation drove up housing prices and cities began to sprawl without any control.
The industrial revolution didn't help
The railway allowed cities to continue to grow. The faster the transport, the further away you could live. This fueled a gigantic speculation boom.
Huge working-class districts were built at the cheapest possible cost. Today we would call them slums. They were cheap to build and extremely profitable. The problem is that after 20 years they were often ready for demolition.
New neighborhoods often had no access to clean water or sewage. Cholera and typhus killed thousands of people. Factories burned enormous amounts of coal. Soot covered the clothes, apartments, water and lungs of the inhabitants.
New York is a good example of this, as demonstrated by child mortality rates before their first birthday:
In 1810 – 12%
In 1850 – 18%
In 1860 – 22%
In 1870 – 24%
The city became richer than ever before, but it did so at the expense of the health and lives of ordinary people, despite the growth of technology and agricultural production.
Changes since the 19th century have brought enormous economic benefits and increased human mobility, but have also led to current problems:
long commutes,
car dependence,
social isolation,
infrastructure overload,
a decline in spontaneous social interactions.
“In the interest of expansion, capitalism was prepared to destroy the most satisfactory social equilibrium. No matter how venerable these old uses might be, they would be sacrificed to financial gain.”
Lewis Mumford
Cities are man's greatest invention
Despite all their problems, cities remain the foundation of civilization. Thanks to them, we are richer, healthier and more developed today than ever before.
But history shows something very important: A city only works well when it remembers that it exists for people, not just for capital. When it forgets this, it begins to produce wealth at the expense of the quality of life of its inhabitants.
It is worth remembering one thing: the place where you live becomes the place you begin to become.
Therefore, contemporary urban planning is increasingly returning to the idea of a "15-minute city", i.e. one in which basic needs can be met close to where one lives.
Sources:
Marchetti, C. (1994). Anthropological Variants in Travel Behavior. International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. Anthropological Variants in Travel Behavior
Ye, R., De Vos, J., & Ma, L. (2022). The Effect of Commuting Time on Quality of Life: Evidence from China. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(24), 16911. The Effect of Commuting Time on Quality of Life: Evidence from China
The City in History - Mumford, L. (1961). The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. Harcourt, Brace & World.
Triumph of the City - Glaeser, E. (2011). Triumph of the City. Penguin Press.
