The Long Commute Home: Sydney's Quiet Burnout Problem

An hour and a half each way is not an unusual commute in Sydney, particularly from the growth corridors in the west and south-west into the CBD and it rarely gets counted as part of the actual working day. It should. That's three hours gone before or after eight or nine hours of work and it has to come from somewhere: usually sleep, usually time with family, usually whatever was left over for yourself at the end of the day. Long commutes have a genuine, measurable relationship with burnout, not because sitting on a train is hard labour, but because of what it displaces. Exercise gets skipped. Dinner gets later. The gap between "home" and "able to be present with the people in it" stretches out until it barely exists some evenings. There's also a particular kind of resignation that builds around a long commute: a sense that this is simply the cost of a Sydney salary, a Sydney career, a Sydney life and that complaining about it is somehow ungrateful given the alternative of not having the job at all. That resignation is worth questioning. Burnout doesn't ask permission based on how reasonable your circumstances look from the outside. It responds to the actual hours in your week, wherever they've gone. If three hours of your day have quietly disappeared into transit, that's worth accounting for honestly, not just accepting as the price of admission.