[saalweachter]

Just Re: the "think of the children" angle.

My commute is 2 hours and change, each way; I'm out of the house for a little over 12 hours a day. My job is flexible, so I can leave for work at a little before 9 and return home a little after; I can also work from home 1 day a week.

This amounts to being away from home ... about 50 hours a week, 60 when I go into the office all five days. Is this forum really going to tell me being out of the house 50 or 60 hours a week is excessive?

Compared to a parent who has to work 2 jobs, or who has a job that requires long shifts, or who has to be away from home for weeks or months, a well-managed long commute hardly interferes with a family life at all.

[dyeje]

In the original comment, the person speaks about being commuting to work or at work literally all their waking hours. That's the scenario, not 50-60 hours a week.

[morgtheborg]

> Compared to a parent who has to work 2 jobs, or who has a job that requires long shifts, or who has to be away from home for weeks or months

Yea, those are shitty for family life too.

[accountyaccount]

I work 9-5 with a 30 minute commute and see my kid for about 2 hours a day during the week.

If you leave at 9 I imagine you get some morning time, so maybe that's your time (and you'd get probably roughly 2 hours there?). Totally cool if that works.

I grew up with a single mom who worked 60+ hours a week and I really only spent time with her on weekends. In retrospect I wish I had parents around when I was growing up. She didn't really have a choice, and she feels the same way I do about it — we wish it was possible.

I don't want to criticize someone's life and what works for them too harshly, since this is just my personal experience, but I've been on the side of the child and the parent in a situation like this and I didn't like it on either end.

[saalweachter]

There are definitely trade-offs involved, and I cannot emphasize "well-managed" in "well-managed commute" enough.

For anyone considering it, I'd definitely encourage you to keep the following factors in mind when designing a super-commute:

  1.  Workplace flexibility; if your workplace requires you
      to be a butt in a chair from 9-5 (or 9-6), it is going
      to be difficult to engineer a workable commute.
  2.  Can you engineer an early or late commute?  If you
      can arrange things to be home for either breakfast or
      dinner, and see your family for a couple of hours in
      the morning or night, it's way less isolating.
  3.  Stick with mass transit; there is a big difference
      between 90 minutes in a car and 90 minutes on a train.
  4.  Optimize your work arrival/departure for train/bus
      times.  If you have to wait 45 minutes for a train
      after getting off work, your commute is 45 minutes
      longer.
  5.  Keep a rigid schedule.  Commuting 2+ hours each way
      with tight margins means you can rarely work late,
      come in early, or go out after work with your coworkers.
  6.  When considering a new home/job with an extreme commute,
      evaluate your entire commute.  If you only consider
      eg the train time, and not the trip to and from train
      stations and wait times, you will get in over your
      head.  Two houses in the same town may have radically
      different door-to-doors for two different jobs in the
      same city.

It's not for everyone, and if you can't design it well it eats into every part of your life, but my point is just that, if you do it right, an extreme commute ... may not be the most salient part of your life. You go to work, you spend time with your family, and you get whatever you were trying to get by living 80+ miles from your workplace.

And you come to relish your time on the train, where you sit quietly and don't talk to anyone or do anything.

[ryandrake]

I have what people would probably describe as an extreme commute. 2+ hours each way (maybe 1.5 hours in the summer when there's less traffic). I leave the house before kiddo wakes up and am usually back after she goes to bed. It sucks. But my spouse is stay-at-home which is barely do-able financially in the Bay Area. I think it's important to let my kid have her own room and sharing walls with neighbors sucks, so apartments and townhouses are not acceptable. I'd move elsewhere but there are very few areas in the country that actually have more than a handful of good tech jobs that are also close to housing.

[Johnny555]

You may be putting too much value on having separate bedrooms and no shared walls, and too little value on your presence.

My parents had 4 children and we lived 3 bedroom 1 bath house, my brother and I shared a bedroom, my sisters shared the other. No shared walls with neighbors, but I don't think that would have really mattered. At the time (and to this day), I never really felt slighted by having to share a room, it was just "normal", since I didn't really know any difference. One of my close friends had just one sibling and his own room, but I didn't really think anything of it -- he had only one brother so he got his own room, I had a brother and 2 sisters so I didn't. Not a big real.

Of all of my childhood memories, the only thing that I wish was different was that my father would have been more involved in my life.

Mom was a stay at home mom, dad worked long hours at his job. I have vivid memories of mom at all of my school and after school functions, but I really only saw dad on the weekends, and even then he was often doing some sort of work from home.

Dad later said he regretted the same thing -- though he felt he had no choice in order to make ends meet.

[mreams13]

"I'd move elsewhere but there are very few areas in the country that actually have more than a handful of good tech jobs that are also close to housing."

You're living in a bubble. There are plenty of good tech jobs all across America.

[vonmoltke]

There are good tech jobs all across America. There are plenty of tech jobs all across America. The intersection of "good" and "plenty", however, is limited to a few generally expensive areas.

[ryandrake]

I didn't say there weren't good tech jobs all across America.

[Sorreah]

What's wrong with living close to people as a kid?

This line of thinking is entirely new and really foreign to me. Even my grandparents, and the people around them, living in a tiny town and owning quite a few large pieces of land chose to build their homes close to each other. Sharing walls even.

How is not seeing your father better than sharing a wall with someone?

[ryandrake]

Sharing a wall means becoming a recipient of whatever sounds and smells my neighbors (whom I cannot choose) decide to let emanate. My family has lived in apartments/townhomes and had to deal with, among other things:

* Deep wall-shaking bass music

* Game show TV turned up to the highest level, at 3 in the morning

* The smells of fried rotting fish heads

* Power tools

* Continuous dropping of items ranging from silverware to books to unidentifiable large metal objects onto tile (shared ceiling)

* A vast variety of sex noises

* The smells of sewage backed up into a bathroom

* Horse-like foot traffic on a set of shared wooden stairways late into the night (drug deals going on upstairs)

Never again. Yes, you can have shitty neighbors in the single-family-home suburbs but the extent to which they can ruin your quality of life is reduced.

[Joeri]

This depends a lot on where you live. I've rented a few apartments that were cheap, by local standards, and learned exactly why this was. Loud obnoxious neighbors, who liked getting high and playing techno at 3 am, or having sex in the middle of the ground floor garden, or going crazy and screaming crazy stuff for hours.

But then I bought a decent apartment in a decent neighborhood and had none of that, and later traded it for a row house where every room has a wall shared with a neighbor in an even better neighborhood and now I pretty much don't notice my neighbors at all.

[ShabbosGoy]

+1 to most of those on your list.

When I lived in Mountain View, my apartment was located on the middle floor. I consider myself a night owl, but my neighbor who lived upstairs liked to practice playing the drums at 5 AM in the morning.

[sjg007]

You can call the cops on that. Even then the landlord would probably kick them out for a higher rent payer as well.

[pm215]

I think working from home some days changes the dynamic potentially quite a bit. I have a relative with a ludicrous commute from Lincolnshire down to London -- but they only have to do it one or two days a week I think.