It’s always a little weird when you can’t unsee something.

Imagine noticing that your workday was no longer measured by purpose or progress, but by how quickly you would be done with it.

Would you shrug it off as adulting? Or would it really bother you to realize how much of your life is spent working?

In the following story, one burned-out employee finds herself in this situation and can’t stop thinking about the realization.

Here’s what’s going on.

I realized my job trained me to measure days by how fast i could escape them

Last week, I caught myself checking the clock at 9:12am and immediately doing the mental math to figure out how many hours were left. Not because I had a bad meeting coming up or a deadline hanging over me. Just because that’s what my brain does now by default.

The day itself was fine. Emails, a meeting or two, some tasks I’ve done so many times I don’t even think about them anymore.

At lunch, I didn’t feel hungry, just relieved to not be working for thirty minutes. I sat there on my phone scrolling through nothing, not enjoying it, just killing time until I had to go back.

Then, she saw everything clearly.

What really hit me was later that night when I realized most of my planning revolves around recovering from work. What show I’ll watch, how early I can get to bed, what I’ll do to feel like myself again before tomorrow resets everything.

Even my weekends feel like they’re designed to refill a tank instead of actually living. I’m not desperate. I’ve got some money saved up from a win on Myprize, enough that I’m not in panic mode.

That almost makes it worse, because I can see the system clearly now. This isn’t survival, it’s maintenance. I’m maintaining myself so I can keep maintaining the job.

I don’t think work is supposed to feel like something you need to escape from every single day, even on the easy ones. I don’t have a solution or a dramatic ending here. I just can’t unsee how much of my life is organized around counting down instead of looking forward.

Wow! Most people have probably never looked at it like that.

Let’s check out what people on Reddit think about this idea.

The situation resonates with this person.

Here’s someone who did this at a call center.

This reader experiences it daily.

According to this comment, busy jobs prevent this.

This is called burnout, and it sounds like it’s time for a career change.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.