A Day in the Life

The alarm screams at 5:00 a.m. I drag myself out of bed, hit the kettle switch, and sigh heavily as I move from fridge to countertop, grabbing the biggest mug. I need to be caffeinated just to start getting ready. The sighs of a thousand weary workers escape my lips in the dark kitchen, only the blue light from the boiling kettle illuminating the remnants of my slow Sunday. I force myself alert, having to go from zero to one hundred in thirty short minutes. There’s a commute and a desk waiting, and a clock that will judge every minute I am late.

By 6:50, I’m sitting under harsh fluorescent lights, the aircon blasting cold, my body wound tight. I’m wearing a uniform that holds me hostage in someone else’s world, my eyes adjusting to the glow of the screen that will consume the next eight, maybe nine, perhaps ten hours of my life. I am in automatic mode, dulled by the lack of sunlight and fresh air. Only white light and a polite silence linger in this quiet space. The air smells faintly of instant coffee and a mustiness from years of neglect.

This is the modern workplace. It’s a system that fundamentally believes owning my time means there are no boundaries.

HR will tell you we’re a family. Management will tell you we’re part of a grand vision. But let’s be honest: I exchange my skills for money. That’s the entire transaction. This isn’t where my purpose lives. My purpose is out there ... with my family, my friends, my art, my rest ... all the things that make me whole. But those things get the leftovers of me. Because work demands the prime hours of my day, every single day, and even manages to filter into my evenings and weekends.

Eight hours, they say. A fair exchange. But the truth is, it’s never just eight.

There’s the unpaid hour before, spent getting ready, fighting traffic, and mentally preparing so I can hit the ground running. There’s the half-hour after, replying to “just one more email” or finishing a task that “shouldn’t take long.” And then there’s the invisible baggage I carry home: the weight of deadlines, the residue of frustrations, and the crushing helplessness that whatever I do or give,  will never be enough.

What remains of me when I finally walk through my front door? A body too tired to cook, a mind too fried to create, a soul too numb to dream.

We call it “being productive,” “hustling.” But what we really mean is being consumed.

The Cost of a Broken Structure

The modern workweek was designed in another era, a time when a single income could support a household, when genuine boundaries between work and life still existed, long before WhatsApp workgroups and Team chats. But somewhere along the way, the system forgot to evolve. We are still chained to a 40-plus-hour week, as if our worth is measured by time spent instead of value created.

Meanwhile, stress-related illnesses are skyrocketing. Sleep disorders, chronic anxiety, burnout, heart disease are all neatly packaged as “personal problems,” when in truth, they are symptoms of a broken structure.

We laugh it off with coffee mugs that say I hate Mondays. We trade jokes about meetings that could have been emails. But beneath the laughter is something darker: an acceptance of the status quo. We have normalized exhaustion and joylessness in pursuit of earning a living.

In open-plan offices, workers sit shoulder to shoulder, keyboards clacking, chairs scraping, counting hours. The hum of printers and the bubbling water coolers create a rhythm of quiet resignation.

And so, we push through. We hold in our pee during meetings. We eat lunch while tapping out emails at our desks. We fake cheerful enthusiasm during performance reviews, spilling words others want to hear because no one wants to hear the truth. We smile for the company photo like good little children.

But the weekend is never enough. It is two frantic days to recover from five days of profound depletion. Two days to scramble to remember who we are before the cycle violently restarts.

Reclaiming the Meaning

Who decided this? Who decreed that for five out of seven days, for sixty-five years, we must serve systems that will forget our names the moment we retire?

We were told work gives life meaning. But perhaps it’s the other way around.

Until workplaces remember that essential truth, they will keep taking: our time, our purpose, our spark, until there is nothing left to mine.

I have so much more to offer than what you're prescribing. Maybe it is time you sat down and listened to the people on the ground doing the work. And maybe, just maybe, there will be positive change to our working days.