Structuring Life Around Work

As almost anyone who has worked professionally has likely thought about and resented at some point, far more than the base hours of, say, a 9-5 job require the worker's time and attention.  Maybe the typical worker does not think about the issue rationalistically, but they still are confronted day by day with the need to structure so much more about their life than the literal hours of paid work around their job.  They might need to wake up hours before the shift actually begins to eat and otherwise prepare to leave (especially harmful to insomniacs who do not fall asleep until the early morning!), and then, for many jobs, there is the damned commute where even a small distance might require an hour or more of driving, adding to the time the employee has to structure around the work despite probably not being paid up until clocking in on-site for in-person jobs.

Taking personal calls during the workday might result in write-ups, termination, or lower pay if one has to clock back out temporarily, which diminishes the amount in each paycheck and hinders the worker's financial progress.  Upon returning home after more time in a vehicle, someone still has to cook or clean, and if everyone in the household professionally works, there is a chance that the only "free" time of the day is spent cooking, eating, and preparing to sleep ahead of the next day's work up until the weekend comes.  And all of this is just pertinent to jobs with consistent, conventional hours—jobs with fluctuating or highly unconventional hours, whether remote, in-person, or hybrid, can be much worse in this regard!

It would be easy to practically become deeply weary with life itself if this is how one's life is structured for so many years of adulthood.  Work becomes the focal point around which other activities are structured not because people want it to be, save for perhaps some delusional people who worship social constructs or very energetic individuals who do not mind expending so much effort, but because they rely on it to make a living.  When this exhaustion is multiplied over years and even decades or coupled with horrid conditions for the general economy and job market, or with expensive personal setbacks like enormous health issues, exhaustion could in turn give way to depression or hatred of the workplace as a whole.

Remote work, where the role actually allows for it (it does in plenty of cases), gives workers back more of their unpaid time throughout the day while also eliminating the need to pay as much for gas and vehicle maintenance over time, as well as environmental emissions from automobile travel.  Precisely because it empowers workers, provides them with heightened autonomy, and does not allow arrogant, pugnacious managerial figures to directly observe employees, some with the power to normalize remote work oppose it.  They benefit from having a financially vulnerable, psychologically desperate workforce to sustain their profits.

The status quo is for a worker's life to revolve around the professional workplace, which is all the more crushing when the compensation and benefits are lackluster, at least relative to the amount of persistent effort one has to put in for the job and the cost of living one faces in everyday life.  They wake up, prepare for work, engage in paid labor, and then have to prepare for the next workday, hopefully accomplishing a handful of personal matters in the evening as their energy dwindles.  When there is no logical necessity or pragmatic benefit (for anyone but a corporate "elite") in having life so extremely oriented around the social construct of professional work, it is asinine and baseless to endorse this status quo, and yet it is so ingrained into the structure of American society that some might just assume this is how things should be.