Welcome to life after your 20s.
this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2025
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you've used up your prime hours of the day at work, that's all.
Spice up your life outside of work. Move to a new home. Start a family. Ditch your family. Start a revolution. Sell your car. Give yourself some challenges, obstacles. You get the idea. SPICE. 🙂
What if you just didn't go home at first? Hit a climbing gym with buddies, or buy an ebike and use that to commute home. Interrupting your normal schedule and psychologically making home only a place of rest might help you reset your life a bit.
You don't have to spend money either. You could even just hit up a park, the library, or hang out with buddies. We tend to go swimming lots once standard time hits.
Everyone sharing their own coping mechanisms in the comments makes me want to question the whole thing itself. Why are we living like this? And why do we need to force ourselves to go through all this? What is the end goal? Are there no better ways to live? Why, why, whyyyy...
Why are we living like this?
No one is going up to people and offering them a better alternative. Literally that's it.
On a less flippant note, The people who represent us, care more about the orhanizatins who give them money than they do about the needs and wants us the people they are representing.
If you aren't producing value to pursue who can offer you a better life, then there is no reason for then to offer it to you.
Now add in tradition, culture, religion and a host of other competing morals and opinions, and we have the world of today
There are better way to live. But we're used to a certain level of comfort, that includes not doing the many, many upkeep tasks to grow food, maintain home, clothing, etc. so we trade some time for currencies, that is then traded with other people, and the leftover currency allows us to indulge in fun things that are also complex and high maintenance, so they're done by other.
Well, that's the theory. In practice, working a full-time job barely, if even, covers the minimum expanses required to live, which keep going up anyway, so you have to work more to barely go by, which thankfully will let you forget that you won't make anywhere near enough money for leisure time. Good thing you won't have any, eh?
sigh knowing we have the technologies, right now, to cover all basic needs, including food and housing, for cheap, but still do with the charade of inflation so that a few select individual can extract all our time from us is really sad.
Capitalism. The answer is capitalism.
Food is literally free, it just grows out of the ground. If we weren't such dickheads we could just take it in turns picking potatoes or whatever and spend the rest of our time fucking about doing whatever we want. Probably
We live in a society
This is pretty much always the case when you start a new job. It takes time adjusting to the environment, the people and everything else. It's going to get better, it always does.
However, skipping proper food and exercise is counter-productive, so do make an effort to cover those needs.
As others have said in this thread: don't go home after work. Go somewhere else. That's it.
If you wanna start doing a workout routine, join a gym close to your work and go straight there instead of going home. Want to learn to dance? Find something to do away from home until it is time to go to a dance class that happens every week. Have hobbies you would normally do alone at home? Start a group dedicated to doing those hobbies together in a public place, and meet there regularly.
If you feel really exhausted after your workday, almost universally you can use this technique: go to the next place you are going to be, find somewhere to sit or lay down, then set a timer for 15 minutes and just close your eyes. You can meditate if you want, but that's not what this is about. You are literally just sitting there, doing nothing, resting your eyes. The hardest part is dealing with the fact that you feel bored and want to look at your phone - don't. Being bored is a way to mentally recover from your stress. Looking at your phone doesn't do this.
Then, work on building up a schedule of events in your life for your after-work time. These should be things that:
- Are fun. They are things you actually want to do. They are goals you chose for yourself because they are personally meaningful.
- Are social. You are spending time with other people with the same interest, who you enjoy spending time with. You can reasonably expect that they will be happy to see you, and that you will be happy to see them.
- Are regularly scheduled. You should be showing up to the same place at the same time every day or week.
Gradually build up a schedule like this for 4-5 days out of the work week, and possibly on the weekend. Leave one afternoon per week open for life admin - laundry, cleaning, groceries, etc.
I work at a home office in a fairly active industry so while I do get to wear sweats or pajama bottoms much of the day, it's still draining as FUCK to be "on" all day. Even at rest the human brain burns enough energy to power a 30-watt incandescent light bulb, which doesn't sound very bright but I would challenge anyone to keep a bulb lit for 8 hours or more purely by peddling a bike or something. When you're thinking and stressed and working out problems and focused on tasks, the power consumption of your meat-calculator goes way up, so the exhaustion is real and tied to physiology.
So here's how I'm trying to tackle having this same problem:
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Higher protein, lower fat and lower carb snacks. A little sugar boost here and there can help but if you're destroying a box of cookies to get through the day you're making yourself more exhausted.
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Drink a LOT more water. It's so easy to forget to hydrate while working, and this doesn't just fatigue you, it wrecks your teeth when your mouth dries out.
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Walks... walks, walks walks. Take a walk at lunch, even if it's around the street, even if it's in circles in the house, you HAVE to keep moving. Sitting for any period of time can be bad for you but it can also make your body want to lay down and go sleepy sleep. Also, no matter how lazy you feel, a short walk after working will always make you feel better physically and emotionally. It creates a mental separation for you to now look at your home life as distinctly different from your work life. Your survival-oriented brain needs this.
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Go to bed early. If your body is screaming to sleep, just go sleep. You're probably not getting enough. I have a lot of sleep issues so lately I just go to bed at 8:00 PM like an old man, and even though I wake up absurdly early now, it helps me physically and mentally prepare for the day. So maybe it's as much about shifting your schedule as it is how much time you spend sleeping versus living.
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Sunlight. A giant nuclear furnace spewing radiation doesn't sound very healthy to stand in front of, but your body is a product of basking in the shockwave of this hydrogen bomb for millions of years, it needs a little heat and warmth on your skin. (One of the nicer feelings is napping with curtains open and sunlight streaming in on your skin on a cold day - holy shit that's the best feeling in the world. Bonus points if you have a warm pet to sleep on your legs.)
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Less caffeine. I could autistically talk for hours about how adenosine and brain receptors work as I have a neurology fixation, but the short version is the more caffeine you drink during the day, the more wrecked you will feel at the end of the day. There are no work-arounds to this, it's inherent in how the brain chemistry works. Try to limit caffeinated drinks to a couple a day and spaced apart.
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Healthier dinners. More fiber, more low-fat protein, less processed carbs. Eat early and not late and you will feel less heavy when you get up.
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Talk to yourself. Keep a narration going, and talking out loud actually helps your non-verbal layers of your consciousness to align to what you want. (I told you, I have a neurology fixation.) You are legion, you have a multitude of thoughts inside you, but they don't have a voice, each vying for attention and reporting things to your "main" controller. It can be amazingly effective to literally talk to these brain layers. If you want proof that I'm not talking out my ass, learn about split-brain syndrome and the eerie effects of a hemispherectomy.
Again, I don't have much to add — but god damnit I try to go to bed early and end up staying awake staring at the ceiling all night anyway.
I could probably get more sunlight but this is a post on how to be less sleepy, not more sleepy.
Idk about better adjusted but it helps to have a checklist and somebody to lean on so you can both push each other to get more done. When you get home go for a 30 min walk each day. Its low energy but its a more natural activity that will help level out your brain.
I have the opposite issue where it takes me like 4-6 hours to fully wake up most days.
9am to 5pm is all day, and you have to be on.
That shit is hard.
Everybody is silently trying to make you feel bad about a regular reaction to a big thing, because they feel the same, which they should all be embarrassed not to realize is fine.
Most of those "better adjusted adults" are probably just better showmen.
I'm curious about the few who aren't, and it's tricky to know when that's who's talking.
By forcing yourself to do stuff.
It sucks at first, and you feel exhausted and like you're not that effective and your brain will keep coming up with excuses and rationalizations as to why you should just rest, but you ignore them and force yourself to do the stuff you don't feel like doing.
Do that for a while and you'll suddenly have a higher energy level and it won't seem like a big deal.
You're basically at the point where you just took up a new exercise every day, and that's just tapping you out. But if you keep doing just that exercise and nothing else, your fitness / energy will only ever rise to the point of being able to handle it and nothing else. If you force yourself to do more, then eventually your fitness / energy level will rise to working + after work stuff being the baseline.
Give yourself time and give yourself rest days, but most people online will advocate for too much self care and don't realize that the only way to actually change and improve is to continually push yourself a little past your comfort zone.
Great analogy.
Any chance you have sleep apnea?
Probably not helpful but when I was roofing and at work for 11-12 hours a day, getting home and going for a short run really helped out (~4 miles). Something about that cardio gave me more energy and would guarantee I'd at least take a shower after. I think I was only running 3-4 days a week then.
It's also a great time to decompress, just being alone with your thoughts a little. Then for a while after your heart rate is elevated and you've got some extra energy.
My back just stopped me from walking down one stair (and I barely made it back from trying) and here you are calling ~4 miles a "short run."
I don't begrudge you that, it's good that your body is capable, but jeez it's hard not to be envious.
try to do some beginner back excercises for a bit, it helped me
edit: oh i just saw you got injured, but still give it a go imo, unless it's painful
edit2: i did these https://cl.pinterest.com/pin/485544403581516708/ (sorry for pinterest link)
If you force yourself to run a little bit one day, then a little bit more each day after that, then eventually 4 miles will feel like a short run.
I respect that, but I broke my ankle and it never healed properly. Apparently I subsequently injured my back (I have a severely bulging disk; not sure whether this is the result of my body or something I did). I'm not saying I'm not lazy - I am - but in this case my complaint is not the result of laziness.
That said, you basically paraphrased BoJack Horseman, and I approve of that.
I mean, I broke my hand and it never healed properly, I have pretty bad tendon damage in one ankle, I got shin splints like crazy when I started running, and I have previously herniated a disk, though not that major.
I'm not saying every single major injury is recoverable from, but look at the history of most athletes and you'll see a lot of major injuries that they were able to recover from.
Again, not saying this is the case necessarily for your back, but I know people who have gotten relatively minor injuries, gotten terrified of them and/or used that as an excuse not to do any more exercise on that body part ever, and then got severely injured again because now the muscles and muscle control for that body part is severely undeveloped, putting more strain back on the tendons / ligaments.
The general recommended approach for most injuries is not to avoid them forever, but to do physio; i.e. reducing your exercises back down to zero weight, but still doing them, and continuously adding weight to re-build and strengthen those muscles and joints.
That's a fair assessment.
My ortho has recently requested that I have some imaging done on my back, but anticipates a surgery to fuse my vertebrae will be needed. After that, from what I've been told, I'll primarily have to conquer psychological barriers.
I highly recommend working on the psychological barriers before surgery. Surgery is never risk free, has a long recovery period, and is often unnecessary. Many people with bulging discs in their spines live completely pain-free. Back pain, in general, is the focal point of a lot of research around chronic pain because it is so common, and the general consensus in the field of pain research is that most back pain is best treated via psychosomatic interventions, not via drugs or surgery.
As someone who has dealt with chronic pain quite a bit in my life, I really recommend getting a copy of the book The Way Out and using the techniques outlined in it. The book was a total game changer for me, and issues I'd been dealing with for years disappeared basically overnight. Seriously. Read the book, start practicing the techniques, and start returning to normal activity and exercise.
It's funny that this is about work life balance because I'm trying to catch some sleep before my fourth twelve in a row and my acute psych nurse brain just went nooo nooooooo oh noooooooooooo but assuming you never experience significant mania, psychosis, or delirium, I LOVE that for you.
Fuuuck we got an Amish patient one time, manic as hell (and you have to be pretty damn hyperreligious for your Amish family to get you committed) and EVERY time we had to tussle security would come out of it like "DAMN we were NOT expecting that from a first glance!" Wiry little thing but once you'd had to deal with it first hand you found out a few things about old-fashioned farm work!
My neighbour doesn't even go inside when she comes back from work, she parks her car, ditches her bag in the bike shed, hops on her bicycle and tears off into the distance. I've seen her on her racing bike in a suit.
So, don't give yourself the chance to veg out, do something on the way back home or go for a walk before you go in?
As soon as I get home: I do not sit down. If I do I'll lose all motivation to get up. Go to the gym, do meal prep etc before I'm even close to my chair.
This is actually what I did when I was in a miserable work schedule and it works!
The moment you sit down, your lethargy keeps going up to a point you barely want to do anything.
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If you have a good job that’s not too demanding and are still feeling this, then you might think about it as a health issue and look into it with your doctor. You have two paths:
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look for some treatable malady - perhaps depression
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focus on wellness and fitness: exercise more, get your electrolytes, fix your diet
Either of those two paths may lead to more energy. I don’t know how old you are but this kind of thing doesn’t get any easier with age so I highly recommend getting ahead of it as soon as you can.
Pure fucking willpower, don’t let yourself sit down when you get home right away.
It's quite insidious, and tbh there's only so much you can do to control how you feel after work. Instead of hoping to feel good every day, I try and set myself up for success on random days where I do leave work with energy.
In my case this means I have 1 or 2 braindead-easy dinners waiting in the wings. Good leftovers I can reheat in the oven, or a meal that takes 2 steps to prepare. If I don't have to worry about cooking dinner, then I have that much more time to dedicate to a hobby when the fancy strikes me.
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