How to Survive a 9 to 5 That Sucks the Life Out of You
It's never just eight hours. The rush, the commute, the boss who belches, nobody leaving at five. And the part the headlines skip.
Here’s what I know. Nine to five jobs suck.
They suck the life out of you. Not because the work is hard. Because it’s somebody else’s agenda, all day long, and none of it is yours.
And it’s never just eight hours. Let me walk you through it.
It starts before the job does.
You get up and you rush. You’re in a state of rush the whole morning, because you have to get there on time. And heaven help you if you have kids, because it’s not just getting yourself out the door. You have to prepare. So before the day even starts, you haven’t had one moment to yourself.
Then the commute. You’re already thinking about the job. You already spent your morning getting ready for the job. Now you get to battle other drivers who are just as aggravated as you are, everybody fighting traffic to get somewhere none of us want to be.
Then you walk in, and your life isn’t your own anymore.
It belongs to however many bosses you have. The micromanagers. The CEO who belches and farts all day like it’s a leadership style. So you adapt. You bend your personality around theirs, a little different for each one, and you try to get through the day without wanting to cry.
Then five o’clock.
Ha.
Nobody really leaves at five. You stay. You try to catch up. You finally check the emails you couldn’t get to, because stuff just kept happening all day. Some places pay you for that and some don’t. It almost doesn’t matter, because either way you still have to drive home.
And now you’re frustrated. You just spent a whole day stressed out over things that have nothing to do with your dreams, your plans, your own stuff.
You get home and try to figure out dinner. Except you probably stress ate most of the day already. Coffee all day. Diet Cokes. Whatever sugar was in reach. I know I did. I’d end up eating late at night just from stress, still going at nine o’clock. Then I’d try to sleep on top of all of it.
A few hours of sleep.
Then you get up and do the whole damn thing all over again.
Then Friday. The weekend, baby.
Except by the weekend you’re too exhausted to do anything with it.
And don’t get me started on the side hustle crowd. Oh, sure. I’m going to come home stressed the hell out, and then I’m going to build the life of my dreams. So I bought the courses. I joined the groups and the forums. I got into all of it. And I still didn’t have the bandwidth to do any of it. When I did try, I was up until midnight, one in the morning. Then the alarm. Then the 9-5, all over again.
It’s a madhouse. It’s a zoo.
Now here’s the part everybody’s scared of.
Everybody keeps saying AI is coming for our jobs. If I show my boss I can do this with AI, they’ll cut my hours. If a machine can do my job, what does that say about me. Am I training my own replacement.
I thought about all of it.
But no amount of fear about AI was worse than the weight of this job.
That’s the part the headlines skip. The thing crushing my chest every day wasn’t a robot. It was the day. The rush, the drive, the bosses, the emails and phone calls after five, the stress eating at nine, the few hours of sleep, and then all of it again.
So I started asking. I didn’t know what an agent was. I didn’t have a clue about any of it. I just asked my AI, if you can do things, can you do this? And it went on from there.
It took the heavy stuff first. The PDFs I used to split by hand in Adobe, the ones that took me hours because I couldn’t stay focused long enough to just get it done, now take about five minutes. Sometimes less. I check them. I move on.
The more I trained it to do, the more it did.
And one day I came home and didn’t go straight to the couch. Didn’t even think about it.
I’m still at my 9-5. My boss still belches. It’s still a zoo.
Nobody there knows my secret. They’ve probably noticed the smirk on my face, though.
Tomorrow I’ll get up and do the whole thing all over again. The difference is, when I get home, there’s something left.
Me, Claude, and the work I don’t do anymore. That’s the whole blog.