Seems to me like having to drive many miles to maintain a job that can pay enough to maintain your fairly far afield home (assuming the home costs less because it's not in the same geography as the office) is a failure of the system as a whole and the company for not making their office work better for their workers.

I mean, unless you have a storefront or regularly have to go to specific places as part of your job, like lawyers going to the court house, then why tf does the company pay for very expensive offices in the middle of a metro area? Put the offices where the workers can actually live near it.

I work in IT, I go to the office to stare at a PC for 8 hours. Something I can literally do anywhere, but instead of IDK, working from home or having distributed offices spaces so people don't have to drive as far, my companies only office is in the middle of a major Metro's downtown in a high rise office for a massive amount of money. So now I have to pay, out of my pocket and time, to drive through downtown traffic, to a parking spot that costs me far too much monthly, so I can simply be physically there to do a job that only requires a PC and an internet connection.

It's all fucking stupid.... And every company seems to do this. Nobody ever comes to our offices and there's literally no reason for them to be where they are, or for me to be there.