Let’s cut the corporate gaslighting and call it what it is: the daily commute is a soul-sucking, time-vampire, masquerading as a necessary evil. It’s not just “getting to work.” It’s an unpaid, mandatory purgatory wedged between our beds and our desks, stealing our lives hour by agonizing hour, and frankly, we’re all being taken for absolute mugs.
Think about it. You roll out of bed, bleary-eyed, already dreading the gauntlet ahead. Is it the bumper-to-bumper crawl on the motorway, where you spend more time staring at the same brake lights than your own family photos? Is it the sweaty, armpit-adjacent hellscape of the 7:45am cattle car… sorry, train? Or perhaps the bus journey where every pothole feels like a personal insult to your spine? Whatever your flavour of torture, the result is the same: you arrive at work already knackered, stressed, and harbouring a simmering rage usually reserved for arch-villains. And you haven’t even logged on yet!
They talk about the “work-life balance,” a mythical unicorn trotted out in HR pamphlets. But who factors in the two hours (or more!) stolen every single day just getting to and from the place that already consumes most of your waking hours? That’s ten hours a week! Forty hours a month! An entire work week every month spent not working, not relaxing, not living – just… transporting. It’s glorified unpaid labour, folks. We’re paying with our precious time, our frayed nerves, and soaring blood pressure, just for the privilege of earning our salary.
And what do we get for this sacrifice? Road rage simmering like a forgotten kettle. The constant low-grade anxiety of being late because of an accident you had nothing to do with. The physical toll – the cricked neck from craning, the clenched jaw from stress, the expanding waistline from sedentary imprisonment in a metal box. We shell out a small fortune for petrol, train fares that rise faster than a SpaceX rocket, or bus tickets that buy you the luxury of standing room only. All while breathing in air thick enough with fumes to qualify as a science experiment.
The sheer absurdity hits you when you realise you spend more intimate time with Mr Razak from Fleet Maintenance, whose questionable tuna sandwich choices haunt the train carriage, than you do with your own kids on a weekday. You memorise the cracks in the motorway barrier, the exact spot where the mobile signal drops out, the peculiar sniff of the bloke who always gets on at Pudu Station. These aren’t life experiences; they’re scars inflicted by the daily grind.
We’re told to “use the time productively” – listen to podcasts! Learn a language! Catch up on emails! Oh, shut up. Trying to concentrate while navigating gridlock or being elbowed in the ribs by a backpack the size of a small planet is a joke. Mostly, we’re just trying not to scream or accidentally make eye contact with the person opposite us doing a disturbing Sudoku.
This relentless churn isn’t just inconvenient; it’s corrosive. It steals our mornings, poisons our evenings, and leaves us perpetually running on fumes. It kills spontaneity (“Fancy a quick pint?” “Mate, I have to beat the rush hour!”). It frays relationships. It makes us permanently resentful husks before we’ve even tackled the actual work.
The commute isn’t just part of the job; it’s the unpaid, unappreciated, sanity-eroding prelude to the job. It’s high time we stopped accepting this theft of our lives as inevitable. Flexible work, proper investment in actually functional public transport, or just admitting that forcing millions to waste their lives in transit is barbaric – something’s got to give. Because this daily grind? It’s grinding us right into the dust. And we’re sick of being roadkill.
Comments