I had to drive across the country and back on the same day at the end of May, which is the sort of trip that sounds romantic for about twenty minutes and then becomes a relationship with the middle lane of a motorway. Five hours each way, give or take the inevitable contraflow around roadworks that have been there long enough to develop their own ecosystem. I do not enjoy driving the way some people do. I enjoy arriving. But I have learned, over years of these trips, that a long drive on your own is one of the few remaining places where nobody can reach you and you cannot reach anything, and that turns out to be worth quite a lot.
The plan was to listen to music. The plan is always to listen to music. What actually happened is that I queued up an episode of a podcast a colleague had mentioned months ago, fully intending to give it ten minutes and bail, and instead I worked through about six episodes before I noticed the petrol light.
the thing about the boring middle
Anyone who drives long distances will tell you the journey has three acts. The first hour you are alert, the satnav is interesting, the radio is fine. The last hour you are willing the destination into existence and recalculating your arrival time every four minutes. It is the middle that does the work. Three or four hours where nothing changes, the road is straight, the cruise control is doing the actual driving, and your brain, deprived of novelty, finally stops skittering and settles into one thing.
I get more useful thinking done in that middle stretch than I do at my desk. Not because the conditions are good, they're objectively terrible, but because there is nothing to do about any of it. You cannot open a terminal. You cannot "just quickly check" anything. You cannot reorganise your tasks instead of doing them. There is only the road and whatever is coming out of the speakers, and if that thing happens to be good, the two combine into something I have started to think of as productive boredom.
The podcast in question was one of those long-form engineering interview shows, two people who clearly know each other well talking to a third about how some piece of infrastructure actually got built. No theatrics, no sponsor reading delivered like a hostage video, just three competent people being honest about the bits that went wrong. There is a particular pleasure in hearing someone describe, calmly and years after the fact, the outage that nearly ended them. The detail that stuck was a throwaway line about how the worst incident of their career was caused not by the clever distributed system they'd spent a year on, but by a single hardcoded timeout that nobody owned. I have lived several versions of that. We all have.
what i actually came away with
Two things, neither of them about the podcast.
The first is that I had been treating these drives as dead time to be endured, and they are not. They are the only block of genuinely uninterruptible time I get all month. I should plan for them instead of resenting them. Pick the listening in advance. Bring water. Accept that the middle three hours are the point, not the obstacle.
The second is more of a confession. I spent a good portion of the drive turning over a problem at work that I had been avoiding, a piece of a system I built a couple of years ago that everyone, including me, now tiptoes around. I did not solve it. But somewhere around the third hour, with a stranger's voice explaining how they'd untangled something similar, I admitted to myself what the real problem was, which is that the design was wrong from the start and no amount of patching was going to fix it. That is not a comfortable thing to realise at seventy miles an hour. It is, however, a true thing, and I had been hiding from it behind a wall of small busy tasks for the better part of a year. The constraint, as a paperback once taught me, is rarely the bit you're poking at.
I got home late, slightly deaf from the road noise, with a numb right foot and a vague plan to rewrite a service I have been pretending was fine. The coffee I made at eleven that night was probably a mistake. The drive was not.
There is also something to be said for the company of strangers who are good at their jobs. I have noticed that the engineering podcasts I keep returning to are never the ones that try to teach me a framework. They're the ones where someone competent talks honestly about a hard thing they did, including the parts they got wrong, with the particular dry humour of a person who has survived it. It's not instructional. It's closer to reassurance. You spend so much of your working week presenting a confident face to other people that hearing someone else admit, calmly, that they once shipped a catastrophe and lived, does more for your morale than any amount of advice.
By the time I came off the motorway for the last time, the light was going and I'd switched the podcast off without quite deciding to. The last stretch of a long drive is always silent for me. The thinking has been done, the talk has run its course, and you just want to be home. I have learned not to fill that bit with anything. It's the cooling-down lap.
I will not pretend there's a neat lesson here. Long drives are tiring and I would rather not do them. But if you are going to be trapped in a metal box for five hours, you could do a lot worse than a good podcast and a problem you've been refusing to think about. The motorway does not care about your deadlines, your unread messages or your carefully maintained sense that everything is under control. It just keeps going straight, and after a while, so does your thinking. I'd recommend it, if it weren't for the roadworks.