The Commute as Boundary Technology

For roughly a century, the commute performed a function its architects never named and its critics never recognized: it was a machine for changing selves. The forty-five minutes in a car, train, or bus constituted a liminal zone belonging to neither domain — the person was no longer at home and not yet at work, and the in-between was doing cognitive work that neither domain could accomplish on its own. Research on commuting behavior consistently found workers using the time for 'transition activities': rehearsing presentations, decompressing from arguments, listening to music that bridged domains. These activities were not incidental. They were the cognitive infrastructure of role transition. COVID eliminated the commute for tens of millions, and the elimination was experienced first as liberation, then — for the segmentor population — as a boundary crisis no one had named.