> I feel like the commute is what people are actually feeling the worst, because it’s unpaid time that they just straight up lose.
There's also the associated side costs: getting ready to leave work (more for women, many feel socially obliged to put on makeup), extra clothes washing (personally, I don't like to wear clothes I had to travel in public transport with), having to schedule around errands like tradespeople coming in for repairs or picking up parcels from the post office, and for those with children all the shit associated with that, like picking up said children from daycare (whose opening times often conflict with expected work availability) or transporting them to school and after-school stuff like sports training... and finally, even though people like to deny even the most obvious (like in Munich, the current explosion of covid in wastewater tracking), there is still a pandemic raging on plus all the other "regular" bugs like influenza, RSV, measles and whatever else shit children catch at school, distribute to their parents, who then distribute it around work.
Had society actually learned anything from the two years of Covid dominance, in-presence work would be the exception not the norm, and people who have to perform in-presence work be compensated for their commute.