You're confusing not being able to with not wanting to. You seem to live in a high rent area: that makes sense if you're optimising for career/lifetime earnings - but in this hypothetical you're not, you're optimising for leasure time.
Adding two hours to your commute matters less when you're only doing it twice a week. Also, anyway, I'll bet that you can buy food for a week on less than 0.75 days wages. You could, if you wanted to, if five days of leisure a week was actually your life goal, most likely make a number of changes and achieve that. But it's not going to be a life of very many modern luxuries.
People on two days a week will generally be (money) poor, but they can live, and have a lot more leasure time. But that's the point: they don't want to, they want luxuries more, and that's fine.
Remember that Keynes was writing a century ago: two days a week can buy you a decently comfortable 1910s life, but that looks a lot like poverty today (you mention your lack of AC and central heating - well, Keynes never had any of that) - because we're spending our money on luxuries rather than leisure time.