I spent a hellish couple of years in London living in a pleasant area but commuting to and from a startup near the centre, and since then I've been remote-only.
There are other trade-offs, but it's hard to beat for low stress levels and free time.
Commuting sucks, but so does living in a city. It's noisy and dirty and crowded. You can't own your own property and crime is much much more prevalent.
Owning a nice, quiet house in a nice neighborhood without the commute is just heaven, honestly. At least for me anyway.
I’d save time, but then I’d spend it driving into the city, anyway, to do most of the things I want to do.
but if you feel like that, consider if you're living in the "right" place for this. "remote" could mean instead of living in san francisco, living in a small town far away. or heck, somewhere in europe, where I live in the very city center on a student budget.
Social isolation is by far the worst part of it. We are social animals, and phone calls and voip meetings actually don’t cut it. If you (well At least if I) spend much time physically alone, I am lonely.
This causes all sorts of little problems. Including strain on your romantic relationships, as your SO becomes more and more central to your social world. As you can imagine, this is a recipe for countless problems. A kind of inertia appears, which makes it less and less appealing to leave the house. You want to see people less. You end up mixing up your work and leisure time (why are you working at 8pm? Why are you playing computer games at 10am? It doesn’t matter that’s why.)
There are ways to mitigate these of course. But they’re mostly just tricks. Like working in a coffee shop, or going for a walk in the mornings.
I think it comes down to the type of person you are. If you can get up every day, and crush work completely alone for a few hours, then use your extra leisure time alone productively, then keep an active social life (one good enough to compensate for the hours spent alone at home every day), then there are no trade offs. I am not. I’m easily distracted, I procrastinate, and mostly couldn’t be bothered to go out all the time to meet people.
Working remotely is fantastic from a cost perspective but it is very isolating and lonely. It's hard to communicate with the rest of the team, and requires specific strategies to make things work.
It's easy to maintain discipline and inertia when you're in the office, and can't fuck off to your bedroom to nap or play with the Nintendo Switch.
Still a better choice, IMO, but absolutely has downsides, and I'd consider going back to in-person office work for the right role.
I've been working remote-only for a couple of months now and did rather well on those parts: Doing sports in the morning, focussed working without slacking off - luckily, I can enter „work mode” as soon as I start my timer - and mostly spending the evening with friends or my SO.
However, I'm still feeling a growing sense of disconnectedness from my work and my colleagues. The feeling of „we're a team and building this together” over time changes into „annoying computer tells me to X”. We're having regular (video)calls, but the lack of social context definitely has a negative impact. 2-3 days of remote work would be optimal.
After briefly experiencing the 101 commute in bay area very early in my career, I decided I wasn't going to do it. Since then I've made a point to live close to work - which has affected both where I've lived and where I've worked, as I also decided I wasn't willing to live close to an office park in the middle of nowhere to make this work.
No regrets at all, although it has always involved some expense. I'm very aware I have been lucky in the options I've had though, this can be very difficult to arrange in some situations.
As an introvert with learned emotional intelligence, I find it draining dealing with people all day and I for the most part liked the people I worked with.
When I worked less than 15 minutes away from work, I missed the down time. Especially since I had just gotten married, lived in an apartment and wasn’t use to coming home to three other people - wife and two (step)sons — and I love my family.
Now that we live in a much larger house, and my wife knows me well enough not to take it personally when so just want some alone time in our home gym, it’s better.
A distance of merely 5 miles can take rent in Austin from $2000 to north of $3500. San Diego and LA have similar (and worse!) gradients in places.
The problem is your rent competition is 4 tech bros rooming together. That's an awful lot of money pushing the prices up.
This was when SH 45 first opened up, so things hadn't yet built up around it to clog it up. Not sure what traffic looks like these days.
Er... two. Now get off my lawn.
Throwing on some music or a podcast helps me unwind while the exercise does its thing to clear my head. I also save 100+ bucks a month on a transit pass too, though my rent increase is not as bad as 1000+ a month, I feel in your case it is definitely worthwhile.
My understanding of communing was people commute for longer for a 'better' house, but don't realise a 'better' house doesn't create happiness as much as a shorter commute.
I love spending time with my wife, but I’m also an introvert who really craves having my own space. Even when my parents come up and visit it isn’t intrusive since we have a guest suite downstairs.
Also the “better home” also means a better school district.
When I worked in Manhattan, I spent the extra $1,000/mo. to live within a couple blocks of work, rather than a 45-min commute away off in Brooklyn like most people I knew. It's expensive to live next to work.
But here's the thing: I always felt guilty about it. That it was "unnecessary" money to spend, even though I had it. That it was irresponsible.
However, I knew from (painful) experience it was still the rational thing to do. Once you subtract time spent sleeping, at work, and "maintenance" (shower, tidying, etc.) you really only have maybe 5 hours a day of personal time max. If you commute 45 min each way... that's only 3.5 hours. And when you factor in that you need a couple hours to relax, eat dinner, etc. -- that's the difference between having time left over for a rewarding hobby or not, which qualitatively changes your life in a fundamental way, and keeps you sane at work. Whether it's going to the gym regularly, reading books, doing yoga or dance, whatever it is.
But it's still so hard to mentally justify paying such a premium for your own leisure time. It's really easy to tell yourself, no -- I'll save money, commute, and I'll still manage to find the time, it'll be enough... because you're optimistic you can have it all. But you can't. You'll lose your hobby or sleep or your happiness.