All of what you say has some aspects of truth, but the fact is that many people are more productive and happier when they work from home.

For me, it’s a lot of things coming together. I like quiet, and I like the ability to concentrate. I hate commuting. While my ability to focus is generally excellent, the time of day that it happens can be variable.

So I have a much better life when I work from home. I do a lot more work because I’m not interrupted casually. I do a better job of handling interruptions because I can spend a minute or two to clean up, then actually research the answer to the question, without having someone hanging over me waiting. If my attention is wandering and I don’t have a deadline, I clean the house or make a snack or go for a walk — I don’t sit there pretending to work. Conversely, if I have an idea in the middle of the night, I jump up and work on it.

I have more spare time, and I get more done, and I’m happier, and I can work with a dog sitting on my lap. What more can a person want?

I should add that if we were serious about fixing climate change, one of the best ways to reduce waste is to reduce commuting. When I work in a job that’s not from home, I have two places to live — my office and my house. Both of them have to be built and heated and maintained, and I have to expend energy commuting between them. I am lucky to have been able to arrange it so that I never had to burn gasoline to commute, but many people do.

(Oh, I know that very few people are serious about dealing with climate change. My wife and I have reorganized our lives to keep our carbon footprint as low as possible, in common with basically zero people that we know, but I have no illusions that our actions will have the slightest effect. But I keep hoping there will be a burst of sanity.)