The Work Before The Question

There is a saying often attributed to Blaise Pascal:

“I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.”

The implication is that something appearing shorter, smaller, and less complex actually requires more effort to produce. Brevity is the product of work, not the absence of it.

This concept is more relevant today than it has ever been. We have more technology than ever to create and share content, write and deploy code, generate and publish ideas. And the systems that reward us are not designed for quality. They are designed for volume. The reason is not mysterious. It maps directly onto Pascal’s observation: it is much easier to produce more than it is to produce better.

I need to be honest about my own participation in this. I write longer emails than necessary. I start making a point before I have fully thought through my argument, let alone considered how it looks from a different angle. Volume is the path of least resistance, and I take it more than I would like to admit.

But volume is not even the most damaging cognitive shortcut that Pascal’s observation points toward. The more consequential failure is subtler: stopping analysis at the first appearance of a plausible answer. It gives you the sensation of having reasoned your way to a conclusion without committing to the harder work of following the argument to where it actually leads. You arrive at a pre-drawn conclusion and retrofit a justification onto it, rather than letting the reasoning take you somewhere you did not expect to go.

Here is what makes this failure particularly hard to catch. Pascal’s short letter and a first-plausible answer can look identical from the outside. Both are concise. Both feel resolved. But they are produced by opposite processes. The short letter is the result of genuine effort: distilled, refined, worked over until nothing unnecessary remains. The first-plausible answer is the long letter in disguise: unrefined output, the raw product of stopping before the work is actually done. Simplicity and refinement are not the same thing. Confusing them is precisely how intellectual shortcuts sustain themselves.

Traffic gave me an unexpected test of that distinction. Not the one I would have predicted.

I am allergic to traffic. I am a reluctant long-distance driver, and crawling along a highway for forty-five minutes has a reliable tendency to put me to sleep. But the deeper irritant is what traffic represents. Merging onto the interstate and instantly meeting thousands of people coming from roughly the same place and going to roughly the same destination is a particular kind of depressing. All of us in cars easily capable of seventy miles per hour, spending forty-five minutes covering twenty miles to an office building where we will spend most of the day on calls with people who are not in that building.

There was a brief reprieve during Covid. Remote work and the shutdown of most public spaces meant Atlanta traffic was the lightest I had ever experienced. That led me to think the answer was obvious: remote work eliminates the problem. The reasoning was simple. And surface-level. Most people on the road are going to a building they do not need to be in. The departure times are synchronized by working hour conventions that predate every technology we now have. Remove the obligation, remove the traffic.

I took the time to dig deeper. What I found was more uncomfortable than a complicated answer. It was the realization that my first-pass reasoning was not wrong so much as it was operating at the wrong level of resolution.

Remote workers do not stop driving. They redistribute.

The most persistent finding across nearly a hundred studies on this subject is counterintuitive: remote work tends to increase overall driving among remote workers, not decrease it. The commute trip disappears, but something else takes its place. Errands, school runs, coffee shops, lunch outings. These trips spread across the entire day rather than concentrating in two peaks. Hybrid workers, on average, live farther from work than fully in-office workers, which means their commute trips, when they happen, are longer. The car use did not disappear. It changed shape.

The gains that did materialize were structurally fragile.

Remote work is not a policy. It is an employer decision. That distinction matters enormously. The cities with the clearest congestion improvements, like Raleigh and Salt Lake City, had high concentrations of knowledge-economy workers whose employers sustained flexible arrangements. When those employers changed their minds, the benefits reversed. San Jose saw work-from-home rates drop 33 percent in a single year as major employers recalled their workers. More than half of US urban areas saw traffic delays increase in 2024 compared to 2023. What the employer giveth, the CEO memo taketh away. Any solution contingent on a variable entirely outside the control of transport planners is not really a solution.

Remote work may actually make the structural problem harder to solve.

This is the finding that most disrupted my thinking. The evidence-backed solutions to traffic all depend on density: congestion pricing, dense transit networks, mixed-use zoning, walkable neighborhoods. They require enough people close enough together to make alternatives to the car viable and politically fundable. Remote work accelerated suburban and exurban migration, dispersing exactly that density. It also undermined public transit ridership, which depends disproportionately on commuter trips to job centers. A transit system that loses its ridership base loses its financial and political justification. The knock-on effect is more cars, more congestion, and a higher cost to build the infrastructure that would actually solve it.

The pattern across all three findings has the same shape. The first-pass answer is not false. Remote work does reduce commute trips. But traffic is not a commuting problem. It is a land use problem, a political will problem, an infrastructure problem that expresses itself as congestion. Operating at the level of commute trips and calling it a solution is a category error. It is like treating a recurring fever with cold water. The temperature drops. The infection continues.

Which brings me back to Pascal.

The remote-work answer to traffic felt like the short letter. Concise, resolved, satisfying. It was not. It was the long letter: unrefined, produced quickly, not yet subjected to the work that honest thinking requires. The actual short letter, the one worth sending, turned out to be longer. More research, more nuance, more uncomfortable conclusions. But it was refined. It was worked over. It did not stop where stopping felt comfortable.

The shorter letter takes longer to write, just as the more intellectually honest argument takes longer to think through. The shorter letter’s reward is clarity. The thorough argument’s reward is a better question. The traffic research did not answer the congestion problem. It reframed it: the question worth asking is not how to reduce commute trips. It is whether we are willing to build the density that makes alternatives to the car viable. And a better question is where every useful answer actually begins.