>Personally I don't understand why you'd want to drive more than 10 minutes by car to work, it's such a waste of your lifetime.

By choosing to drive 40 minutes to work, you can live 10 minutes from a national park or a beach or the rest of your family or a golf course or whatever works for you in your off hours.

Why orient your life around your work?

Because, simplisticly, you probably only get to do the 10 minute journey twice a fortnight but you have to do the 40 minute journey 10 times in that same period. So it's 140mins vs 410mins; you in theory save 3h30m per fortnight by living closer to work.

It's actually choosing not to orient your life around work that causes the decision to live closer, thus saving commuting time and overall spending less time on work related activity.

Do you have time and energy to spend time in those places after work on weekdays? I, for the most part, don't. It makes more sense to drive to them once or twice a week on weekends vs living close to them, but having a long commute on weekdays.

>Do you have time and energy to spend time in those places after work on weekdays? I, for the most part, don't.

If you don't live somewhere where it's easy you definitely won't. Make the things you /want/ to do easy. You'll do the things you /must/ do whether it's easy or hard, but if the things you want to do are hard as well you won't do them ever.

The price of real estate in Australia more than 10 minutes drive from many people's work is often hundreds of thousands of dollars less than close to their work.

we have this real estate problem even in the Australia without roos (talking Austria here) and I wonder: why won't "work" move. How important is it for you to be physically at a certain place when you (and your team and manager) might just as well be 30 minutes closer to "home"?

Probably big cities need to be punished for attracting to many companies with a lot of staff. Believe it or not, Linz, the city I live in, has more workplaces that inhabitants. Something's clearly wrong here and I don't mean the work-daily rush hour.

To be fair, I want to do it (~30 min commute) because it allows me to live in a halfway decent place with stuff to do and still work in a laid back environment in BFE

You just proved GP's point, you don't want the commute, you want to live in the suburbs.

Where I live, the home price difference between 10 minutes to work and 2 hours from work is over $1M USD.

I love it, I love even driving 5 minutes with a car! I am such a "in a car animal". Car is amazing!

I have a friend, two actually, considering to move into a van.

But then, I have a sailboat that I'd very much prefer as a home (the wife sadly has a different opinion)