When your children are adults you're going to miss the time, not what you gave them.
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.
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.
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.
You're living in a bubble. There are plenty of good tech jobs all across America.
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.
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.
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