No wonder given that the daily commute is both mentally and physically taxing for most.
I've been working remotely since 2015 and have already decided to settle in a perhaps less attractive, but definitely cheaper neighbourhood so that I could have some office space in the house.
In the long run it's probably going to cost as much as the sum total of fuel and vehicles used over the years, but the main benefit is not having to go over this stressful routine of negotiating my place in a stream of cars.
Make sure you account for the value of time saved. Time is precious and there's never enough, if I can find a way to add 40 more minutes to my day I'm going to value that immensely.
Don't use it for additional time spent working uncompensated! Your commute wasn't paid for (typically), so don't give that time away to someone else for free now that you're saving it.
Personally, having a long bay area commute, i now use that time instead to sleep in AND go for longer walks with my dog, that we’d usually reserve for the weekends
Your employer doesn't directly pay for you to go to school, but most people would still see that work eventually pays for education.
Commuting is similar.
But I agree with the gist: if you figure out how to be more productive, eg by doing some task faster or by eliminating your commute, there's no moral obligation to hand over all the gains to someone else.
In my case, the current situation adds 10 hours to my personal time. Thinking hard about moving to a remote-only position next. Sadly, moving closer to the workplace is out of the question because no force on earth will bring me to live in a densely built up city ever again; I reject urbanization for myself. I'd rather enjoy a green, quiet countryside.
The big problem I've run into being remote is that while I can live anywhere and would totally fine living farther away from the bigish city I live near, my partner works in a field that determines that we live close to a major university and I'd feel like an ass for having 0 commute while she has to drive 45 minutes just because we could get more house/land/whatever farther away from the city.
Wouldn’t this problem be even harder to deal with if you didn’t work remotely? You only need to plan for the radius of one person’s commute rather than limiting your housing options to a balance of two locations.
Totally, not saying it isn't a problem in that case either, but rather that remote is hailed as this "you can live anywhere, move to the cheapest city you can!" solution when it's not (for most people).
It's a choice to work a non-remote job though. My partner could work, but it wouldn't be remote, so she's a stay at home parent while I work remote, enabling us to live somewhere rural (which also happens to be cheaper; one income easily supports a family of four).
Both people in a relationship could work remote jobs to enable geospatial freedom, also a choice! When someone says that working remote isn't a solution though, that's not accurate. They're saying, "I've chosen a work arrangement that is incompatible with remote work".
That's something we've been looking at recently, actually -- moving somewhere cheaper, but the problem we've found is that there just really aren't any jobs that she's interested in in the area we've been looking at (even outside of her current field, which she wants to leave anyway) -- we're looking at one spot in particular because of my mountain biking hobby and because I've lived there and have a lot of family there --, and we don't have kids, so it's hard to determine "okay, is it fine for us to just move and for you to have no idea on what job you want to do there?" even though my income is more than enough to sustain us (4x hers).
For her, the idea of doing that -- moving with no job or even an idea of what job to do there -- doesn't sit well. She doesn't like the implied dependence on me and that others may see her as a failure because she doesn't have a job for X time or an idea of what she wants to do. I can do all I can to convince her that that isn't the case and that not everyone has their sights set on something when they're in high school/college (I did, which doesn't help). Ultimately I think the change would be good since I think her job/boss in our current city is toxic and mentally rough, such that moving to an entirely new area with totally different prospects could create a positive.
People get used to most things. A few weeks after winning the lottery or losing an arm, they are mostly as happy as they were before. (Mostly! Not completely.)
But I read somewhere that the misery of commuting is strangely resistance to the hedonic treadmill.
I suggest you look up more recent research on the hedonic treadmill and winning the lottery and losing a limb specifically. I’m very confident winning the lottery durably raises life satisfaction and that it takes years, not months for losing a limb to be mostly but not entirely gotten over.
Entirely resistant if I remember correctly. You don’t get used to commuting, you forget what it feels like not commuting, like you don’t get used to feeling like crap because you don’t exercise or are sleep deprived, just forget what normal feels like.
I can understand but these things are different for each of us. I love my 20 minute low stress commute. I listen to podcasts or think about problems in an isolated day. It breaks work life from home life and helps with boundaries. Obviously some commutes are worse than others but we all have different needs.
People really ought to put the number on their post (like you did; thank you) so we know where they're coming from.
I was in the Bay Area, and one of the big reasons I left was the 3-4 hour commute. For a while, it was manageable, as the train provides some ability to work, but towards the end CalTrain was just falling over from lack of capacity. Packed to the gills trains, trains breaking down, hell, even derailments.
Moved, and cut the commute in half; it's only two hours now, and it feels wonderful. Somewhat hilariously, biking is the same speed as public transit. Sadly, my public transit still no longer really supports a working; too packed.
I'd love to have a 20 minute low stress commute. But I also don't equate "low stress" with driving, regardless of podcasts.
(Unless you have a 20 minute commute on public transit. I must spend ~30-40 minutes of my commute simply getting to public transit.)
Yeah, all these things are choices. I live an hour from Philadelphia. I could make more in a big city but I like my salary to cost of living ratio. I could also walk to work if I moved into the town center but would have to up my spending on housing and lose my yard. People have lots of choices they can balance. I lived in Cambridge for a while. My apartment was a 15 minute walk to the T (public transit). I could have been right on the line but my rent would have been 50% more at least. It was a choice of what I was willing to spend and what kind of inconvenience I would tolerate.
I've been working remotely since 2015 and have already decided to settle in a perhaps less attractive, but definitely cheaper neighbourhood so that I could have some office space in the house.
In the long run it's probably going to cost as much as the sum total of fuel and vehicles used over the years, but the main benefit is not having to go over this stressful routine of negotiating my place in a stream of cars.