And there are other options, like taking another job in a smaller city. Running a small business in a suburb isn't sexy, but you can afford a yard and have time to teach your daughter about robots and be there when your son gets bullied on the bus ride home.
The trick is to spend your time smart, which means I watch a lot less Netflix than I did before I added 30 minutes to my commute.
I'm not an extreme commuter by American standards though, I only do 2-2 and a half hour a day in total. We also work 37 hour weeks, so there is that.
I wouldn't trade actual quit and spectacular nature for anything in the world though.
I grew up in a medium sized city and it was awesome! I wouldn't trade it for the world. Sure, I had to share a room but it really doesn't matter because I only used my bedroom for sleeping anyways. I had tons of access to other kids in the neighborhood [1] and kids are great keeping each other entertained. We also had access to tons of various public parks, playgrounds, and facilities in which to play. Most were a short walk or bike ride away. My days were filled with adventure. I would be bored spending my time alone in a backyard all day.
[1] The Jerry Seinfeld bit about making friends as a kid is on point - "Of course when you're a kid, you can be friends with anybody. Remember when you were a little kid what were the qualifications? If someone's in front of my house NOW, That's my friend, they're my friend. That's it. Are you a grown up? No. Great! Come on in. Jump up and down on my bed. And if you have anything in common at all, You like Cherry Soda? I like Cherry Soda! We'll be best friends!"
Problem is kids have the internet now, you don't have to leave the house for entertainment with the internet.
Which is why distance from work was important for me as a parent.
Having grown up in the city, I'm fucking glad my parents didn't live in the suburbs.
You may think you are doing your kids a favor by living in a sterile, boring suburban neighborhood, but you actually aren't.
Yea, my commute is worth it. And unlike you i've lived long periods in the suburbs, downtown in a large city, and even on a farm. The farm was easily best, suburbs a clise second, and city only good when you don't have kids.
(75 sq m is the notional English average for a 3-bed, but in reality that includes bathrooms, hallways, stairwells, and other unusable internal space. When buying a house in London, I wrote a scraper that extracted room dimensions, and 55 to 65 is a much more realistic range.)
Are you somewhere where people don't have basements?
My father's house in the UK was built in last 10 years and promises 5 bedrooms, I've often thought that knocking this down to 3 and making reasonable sized rooms would have made for a much nicer home. I imagine it also would have knocked however many thousands off the seller's asking price as well though...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/property/10909403/British...
I ended up with a 3 storey, 4 bed 120 sq m town house with garden + garage 35 minutes motorcycle ride from my workplace, or 55 minutes if I have to take train + tube (which I very rarely do, because waiting for the train sucks if it's delayed or missed).
People who think they're doing their kids a favor by commuting 4 hours a day to work 10 hours are at best misguided and most probably have a martyr complex.
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.
Yea, those are shitty for family life too.
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.
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?
* 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.
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.
Most places in most countries have noise ordinances, not to mention rental agreements that prevent that
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.
You're living in a bubble. There are plenty of good tech jobs all across America.
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.
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.
And you come to relish your time on the train, where you sit quietly and don't talk to anyone or do anything.