The 8+8+8 rule and traffic

There’s a quite popular meme circulating on social media these days. It’s called the 8+8+8 Rule, and it says: Distribute your day into 8+8+8 hours to make a good balance sheet of your life. It then explained the 8+8+8 as eight hours of honest good work, eight hours of good sleep, and the remaining eight hours to be spent on 3F’s, 3H’s, and 3S’s. The 3F’s are family, friends, and faith; the 3H’s are health, hygiene, and hobby; and the 3S’es are soul, service, and smile.

Which, save for some individuals in extreme living conditions, seems true to most of us. It might even be difficult to get out of this mold since it seems as the most efficient allocation of our time and energy which affords us a balanced life that wouldn’t strain our physical, mental, and spiritual selves. There would be many who may stray from this rule, but it seems to be one which defines most of us, the majority of human beings.

The work and the sleep we will always maintain, but the third eight hours are varied, grouped into three and further dissected into nine. Some may have more or less of each but in general, our eight hours outside of work and sleep revolve on these three, nine, or even more, human undertakings. The differences in how we spend or allocate the eight hours depicts our individuality and makes us unique among the billions of human beings in the world.

Family, friends, faith, health, hygiene, hobby, soul, service, and smile! We only have a limited eight hours to spend on these and we must appropriate the eight hours to best serve us. But I immediately commented on this otherwise “correct” illustration with a sad reflection --it’s not eight hours! It’s less, sometimes substantially. We may think we have eight whole hours, but we don’t! Why? Because to different extents, some minutes and even hours may be spent on the road from home to work and back or from home to school and back.

We travel every day, and we certainly don’t use working hours or sleeping hours for that. Whatever time we spend on travel to work/school eats up the eight hours of family, friends, faith, health, hygiene, hobby, soul, service, and smile! If we spend 30 minutes going to work/school and 30 minutes going home, that’s one hour less the eight hours. If we spend one hour in traffic congestion per direction, that’s two hours less! If our daily commute is two hours each way, that means we only have four hours each day to spend on all those more valuable things in life!

Which is why traffic congestion is bad, very bad! If there is one single issue of concern which affects our daily lives, it’s traffic congestion. And it gets worse exponentially! If there is a single area of concern our government should address for its people, it’s the mobility issue and how to make it fast, safe, comfortable, and inclusive. Family, friends, faith, health, hygiene, hobby, soul, service, and smile --all these are super important, and much depends on how the government makes our daily travel and mobility better for us.