[lmm]

Commuting is pure misery, especially driving, and people tend to underestimate the effect of that. Avoiding a 3 hours/day commute is more than enough to explain why you'd be much happier/healthier/... even if everything else in your life had gone downhill. (A happy marriage is also a well-known source of happiness/contentment/etc.). I don't think the change in your wellbeing has anything to do with local cheeses or lack of temperature control or anything like that; if you'd switched to working from home and married but stayed in your climate-controlled big house you'd see the same improvement, maybe even a bigger one.

[roryisok]

Eliminating a 3 hour commute every day would constitute a fairly considerable drop in energy usage

[lmm]

Yeah. It's possible to use energy badly, so human value is something more subtle and detailed than energy usage. I do think it works as a crude proxy though.