The benefit of a commute to work:
Broadly, boundary theory holds that however much Facebook encourages employees to bring their “authentic selves” to work, we have multiple selves, all of them authentic. Crossing between one role and another isn’t easy; it’s called boundary work. And the commute, as Arizona State University’s Blake Ashforth and two collaborators wrote in a seminal paper on the topic, “is actually a relatively efficient way of simultaneously facilitating a physical and psychological shift between roles.”
This dips into role theory in social psychology, which is perhaps the most fascinating speciality of psychology you can study:
Role theory posits that the roles that people occupy provide contexts that shape behavior.
Additional note: the average commute seems to remain constant, at about 30 minutes, from the era of the horse-drawn carriage to the Tesla.