I've always had a work commute until this dawned on me. You think you're making whatever an hour but you're not, you're paying a certain amount just to do that job and that varies from situation to situation but for example I remember I got what I thought was a pretty decent job, decent enough that I didn't think twice about the 36 mile one way commute I'd be making. I worked that job for 3 years and wondered why my finances seemed about the same or even worse than they were when I was making a few dollars less an hour and not even half the distance away. Basically you take everything that you absolutely need to pay to practically be employed and factor that into your wage. You can calculate it for hourly or salary or really any type of pay, hourly will probably just be the easiest.
So for example, if you own a car, obviously you have gas but also you could pay tolls, you have registration/tax fees, costs of ownership like maintenance expenses, insurance, upgrades etc. Let's actually do my old job as an example. 36 miles commute with tolls. Usually 5, 8 hour days a week but got overtime pretty often, but we'll just say 360 miles a week. The car I had got around 20 mpg fuel efficiency which is near the middle of the spectrum. So I was buying 18 gallons of gas every week just to do my job. If we did this calculation today, with gas around $3.50 a gallon, that's $63 bucks a week. I already just lost a $1.50 an hour from my pay based off a 40 hour week. The tolls averaged about $15 a week but I know they've increased so we'll say $20, also technically I know I could have skipped them, however that would have resulted in much more mileage, decreased fuel economy and increased wear (highway vs city milage) so we'll go ahead and factor that in. My insurance is currently $60 a month so $15 a week. The yearly registration fee is $35 and I changed my oil myself every other month, costing around $35 in today's prices. All of those come out to about $82.50 a week, which means basically $2 per hours is immediately wiped off my pay because those expenses were necessary to be an employee and I didn't even factor in unplanned vehicle maintenance costs which can be devastating, and it's all because all of this shit is normalized in this fucked up world.
You can still do these calculations if you ride the bus for your commute because it still costs money, you can factor in clothes you have to buy, some companies will charge for their uniforms to be taken care of which should already be shown on your paystub, and if it's $20 a week you are actually getting paid $.50 less than you thought (probably sounds crazy but I had an employer do this) Another thing relevant to certain fields is tools; I knew some people paying hundreds a week for their tools that they need to do their jobs and probably don't even think about how that means they really are just earning less than they thought because they're simultaneously paying to earn.
I guess the moral of the story is none of this shit makes any sense at all, and the prospect of money has blinded people to build an absolutely vile way of life and normalized it to the point of ensuring that lessons will be learned in the hardest possible ways