If you live in Bengaluru, traffic anxiety will wake you up before your alarm. What should be a normal 9-5 workday is slowly turning into a 9-9 survival shift and one frustrated office worker just said what every Gen Z professional has been thinking.
In a Reddit post that instantly hit home for thousands of people, a Bengaluru commuter ranted about spending 2 to 3 hours every single day being stuck in traffic just to reach office and questioned why companies are still obsessed with forcing people to show up in person.
When your daily commute is longer than your Netflix time
“Spent >2-3 hrs in Bangalore traffic to commute to office daily. I do not understand why corporates can’t allow hybrid options. 9-5 is essentially 9-9 once you add commute and overtime. Life is supposed to be beyond work while we are just spending our prime walking to offices in herds like sheep,” the person wrote.
Let’s be real, Bengaluru traffic is not just annoying anymore. It is lifestyle-destroying. Three hours in traffic means less sleep, no time for gym, hobbies, friends or even mental peace and coming home exhausted before life even starts. Gen Z grew up watching burnout culture break millennials, and now we are asking the obvious question – why are we wasting our best years on roads instead of actually living?
WFH isn’t laziness, it’s logic
The Reddit user also shut down the classic corporate excuses that often tell you to find a job closer to home or home near your office and that traffic is part of city life. “I hear the people asking to get a different job, choose a place near your office etc?” he wrote. But here’s the real tea – if work can be done on a laptop, then why does location even matter? The post pointed out the hypocrisy – “If work-from-office is so important, why do companies still expect us to carry work home in the name of ‘productivity’?” And rightly so. You want physical presence and after-hours work. Pick a struggle.
Why Gen Z is done with office-only culture?
For Gen Z, jobs aren’t just about salary anymore. They are about work-life balance, mental health, time freedom and actually having a life outside Excel sheets. Watching parents spend half their life commuting taught us one thing that grind is not a flex.
Remote and hybrid work showed us that more fucus and less stress with same output is possible. So going back to daily traffic torture feels like a downgrade, not “office culture”.
The real problem isn’t traffic, it is outdated mindsets
Cities like Bengaluru aren’t getting less crowded anytime soon. Offices aren’t getting closer. Commutes aren’t getting shorter. Yet many companies are still stuck in 2010. Instead of forcing everyone back, we are only asking why not trust employees, why not measure results instead of attendance, and why not make hybrid the norm, because honestly, no meeting is worth three hours of bumper-to-bumper suffering.
For Gen Z, the message is clear. We are not anti-work, we are only anti-wasting life. If a job demands eight hours of work, three hours of commute, and two hours of overtime, that’s not ambition. That’s burnout in slow motion. And stories like this Bengaluru commuter’s rant are exactly why Gen Z is choosing freelancing, remote roles, flexible startups and global jobs over traditional office grind.
The future of work isn’t about fancy office spaces and free coffee. It’s about time, freedom, and sanity. And until companies understand that, traffic-packed cities like Bengaluru will keep turning young professionals away from office-only jobs. Because no paycheck feels worth losing your life to the road.