I would have agreed with this a few years ago but it's more nuanced than that.

Commute time is built-in decompression time that can be very valuable. For example we have small kids and it's just not going to happen that I am going to tell my wife on a given morning or evening "take care of them while I go on a hike" or whatever.

So on days they I decide to go to the office - I get about 2 hours (one hour each way) of reading time (or podcast time, if I were driving in) which realistically would not materialize any other way.

I think many dads that are my fellow commuters see the commute as a sort of sacred solo space that's hard to maintain otherwise (eg the unspoken etiquette is if you see someone you know on the train you don't sit next to them so they can have their peace and quiet)

I did the math during COVID. I was putting in about 30% more hours when I had to go to an office, and all of them were unproductive. I wasn't being paid any extra to do that - which was especially unfair since I also had additional wear and tear on the car, lunches out, fancier clothes to buy, etc.

I may go back to the office someday if I'm forced to, but I won't do it for free. Companies need to compensate in office employees not just for the extra work, but for the expense.

Now I use some of those extra hours for the company, and some to work on my side projects. It's glorious. I'm both more productive at work and happier than I've ever been. I also don't get sick when all the cube-dwellers do a few times per year.

It’s not time lost to commuting. For some people, without the structure of a workday imposed by commuting, they devolve into doing other time-wasting activities. In fact the author said without this commute they would “be on my phone/on Reddit/read HN comments all day/etc.” From this light, a commute doesn’t cause any more time to be lost, but rather it restricts the amount of time lost to be the commute itself, rather than the entire workday. This is something I’m seen very often in people who are dissatisfied with WFH. They lose focus, lose the sense of time, and waste the entire day without the commute.

I've been in multiple car accidents this year, none of them my fault. Commuting might actually be the death of me, I can't express to a future employer how much I'm willing to trade just to not have to do it anymore. Doesn't help that I deal with some of the worst traffic in America...

> Not saying that OP is living their life wrong or anything, to each their own of course, but I prefer working from home precisely because of how much more _life_ I get to live as a result.

They have to find a job that allows them to do that, and such jobs are increasingly difficult to find.

Where I'm based, even though it might be the smallest startup that could save a good bit by getting rid of their office costs if they gave people WFH, they won't.

I think the quality of a commute is very different depending on whether it's by car or by train, since you can actually read / write / program / draw on a train. Obviously I'm still pretty glad when I get to work from home and sleep in a little and make some good coffee though.

I think I once read that commute distance happened to be a strong predictor of adult happiness.

I don't know if the source was reputable or not.

Minutes spent transporting to work is one of the best single factor predictors of turnover and workplace dissatisfaction.

Yeah, I'm more like you. I also agree with "to each their own" and like that we're so different that someone like the author enjoys going to an office and struggles with phone/device usage when working from home, and others like us prefer remote work.

To me, it's not just the commute. I actually prefer working from home. I enjoyed his description of Miyazaki greeting the ghosts though, I think I could work from an office if it was my studio, but I'd want it to be very close to my home.

Remote work also makes it possible for me to follow my natural "productivity cycle," which means I often get to work until late in the evening while still being able to have dinner with my family and then just have a short commute to my bedroom when they're (usually) already asleep. I did late-night (and even all-night) work too from offices when I was young, but it's one thing to do that in your very early 20s and with only your parents as family, than as an almost 50 with a spouse and kids.

As for enshittification defenses, besides having a family (including cats, used to have a dog too), having musical instruments within reach is great for when I need a quick break. Some breaks can also involve devices and still not be about dopamine, like when I reach out for my personal laptop to open renoise. Lately I've also taken up drawing a bit. I suck at it, but I still enjoy the activity.

I agree on the benefits of social activities. My workout of choice is weightlifting and I do have regulars that I talk to (plus for some exercises you really do need someone around if you want to safely get to your breaking point).

The one thing I miss from my youth days is social music playing. I hope I'll get back to that someday, but everybody's life is busy in different ways and, unlike getting together for coffee or beer, getting together to play music does require a bigger logistical effort and time budget. While I wait for the opportunity to arise, playing along to records is an OK way to get by.

During the course of my sorry career, beginning in college in fact, my minimum commute time was 20 minutes. I had some commutes that were much longer and complex.

Driving a motor vehicle was perhaps an opportunity for focus and solitude, but the act of driving itself is too active, too demanding, to be zen or deeply contemplative. The most I could do was rock out to a custom mixtape or the radio, and ignore my troubles.

One commute was across a treacherous mountain pass with switchbacks and deadly fog. I once deliberately caused an accident there on the highway. I once came six inches from wrapping myself and my Integra around a pine tree. I don't miss driving to work.

Later in life, when I was denied ownership of a vehicle, I commuted by public transit. This could be heaven or this could be hell. If there was a disturbance or complication on the bus, it was a daily trauma and I arrived at my destination as a triggered, frazzled, bundle of nerves. If the voyage was uneventful, I truly had a chance to space out, watch the scenery, and arrive relaxed and calm.

Nowadays, I'm more likely to use a taxi or a rideshare. Waymo is the calmest and most efficient transport for solitude and silence. But taxis travel very fast, and being rushed is not conducive to contemplation. So, I do try to mix in some public transit wherever possible, and during those times, I pray it's on the uneventful side.

Lol - I should have read your post before writing mine.

To each their own of course, but I personally don’t get the point of avoiding AI music when what you’re listening to (lofi beats) is essentially elevator background tier noise anyway. I listen to various types of it all the time and I honestly couldn’t tell you the difference between AI or not in this genre.

Listening to Tokyo Echo Sounds right now, is it AI? Probably, but how tf would I even know if I did care?

Like the author, I enjoyed wfh for some time, but also found this creeping crushing loneliness settling on my brain after some years. My solution was to find a co-working space that actually has a community (most spaces are just places to rent a desk). It's helped me set up a routine and get some water cooler talk in a few times a week.

But more importantly, through the community I've met some new friends, so my social life blew up. Now I rely less on the co-working space and more on meeting with the new friend group for sports and debates.

It's been an adventure in finding out what makes me tick and finding ways of addressing it in healthy ways.

There's a nice extension called unhook which blocks a ton of the YouTube trash, you can configure it to hide different things. At this point, they only thing I see on YouTube is a search box and my subscriptions.

Now that Shorts removed the dislike button it seems to have gone to complete shit. I used to get shorts that were obviously a bit engagement-bait but also relevant and interesting. Now it's just 100% engagement slop and there's no way to give negative feedback. I tried "liking" everything that wasn't slop - made no difference.

Other than the NHK World documentary series, The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness was quite good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24wViGZKVu8

I was about to say something similar: OP talks about how in office days support their routine but adding the office to my day would do more to disrupt a routine than solidify it. As of right now my workdays, despite being WFH, are shockingly rigid in their form. Wake up, coffee, weightlifting and a podcast, start work, coffee break around 1030, lunch at noon with wifey, back to work until the afternoon doldrums set it, then exercise bike to try to force some oxygen up above my shoulders, then finish out the day, then dinner. Adding everything that an in-office day entails would mean developing two routines, one for office days and one for wfh days, and also that the number of ways that my routine could be disrupted on office days going up significantly. I'm not here to prescribe my way of life for everyone, I'm actually quite strange, but I do think that it's important to point out that there are ways to get the stability that people thrive on in WFH situations or in the office.

It's a rarer and rarer thing. Most people's experience of work is nothing like this, just a desperate struggle to stay employed at all, ideally in an industry where their skills give them some kind of leverage.

Don't glamorize it too much in your head, the modern downtown office isn't too great in my opinion

Big open office spaces crammed with people working elbow to elbow. Very noisy. The problem of bosses threatening to kill you still might exist, asshole bosses exist in every work setting

It's probably still a better workplace than factories but probably not as much better as you're imagining

Edit: My favorite workplace ever was located at an industrial building. We had our own secured parking lot we didn't have to pay for, we had actual cubicles, and lots of space between people and teams. It was awesome not having to spend all day with headphones in to block out the sound of people on sales calls. We had a gym that was just for people at the company! It was awesome

Then they moved us downtown and it sucked. My commute got so much longer and my workspace got so much worse