After bike commuting for 10 years and now working from home, I ask that question all the time.
My only guess after asking around is people think they "have to". People put their head down and forget to think about the bigger picture. Maybe working for DoorDash is the same type of thing?
A bike commute for me would be a minimum of 2 hours (twice a day) and I'm almost at the years of experience the vast majority of remote jobs start at (which isn't a small number like 2), so you could say I "have to".
Yep, it's totally someone's choice to live in a neighborhood with affordable housing as opposed to a mansion across the street from their place of employment. Gee, looks like we both know how to make irrational overgeneralizations.
This is classic Stockholm syndrome with commutes that I see all too often.
What's wrong with the commute? The fact that, if you didn't have the commute, you could do all those same things and also anything else you can think of. The opportunity cost is enormous.
You can't have your PhD advisor at home, but consider how many people commute to jobs that could be done just as effectively from home/remotely. How many man-hours are lost to that.
Also, it seems like you're using public transport. You're lucky that that is a) a viable option and b) pleasant enough that you don't want to murder people after a few weeks of doing it. The majority of commuters around the world are using personal transport, which has a huge carbon cost and does not allow for doing other things while commuting.
Personally, I wouldn't mind a 40 minute train trip and a 5 minute walk either side, but a 40 minute drive is awful. I've gone from a 40 minute drive to a 10 minute drive, and I feel "free-er" because of it.
Must be a place with good public transit? I know someone that drives an hour and a half one way just to work in a call center and drive back. So around 3 hours wasted. I guess only music, or maybe a audio book or podcast then in that case but I've seen people text and drive, read books and do makeup before though too even if you aren't supposed to. So many parts of the US lacks public transport, so if you don't have a car you are limited so much. However in the bigger cities there's more options.
