Employee shares her struggle of commuting 3 hours to work, leaving little personal time to even do chores, receives sound advice: 'In a single 24-hour weekday cycle, I have on average 4 hours a day to just exist without work'

What should you do in this situation? Like any situation, good or bad, try to make the best of it and make your current circumstances work for you as much as possible, while seeking to improve your situation and make changes when and where you can. Of course, this is easier said than done, and when you're in the moment and lacking energy due to stress and strain, things can feel impossible. Great advice was offered in the ensuing discussion, particularly by one user who shared how they dealt with a similar situation.

I myself lived this, the pain of being stuck in unmoving and unpredictable rush hour traffic while commuting from my parents' house shortly after graduating from university. Finding a job had been hard; finding an apartment in a city that had a massive influx of people from another state was impossible. There was no telling on any given day whether the drive would take an hour and a half, two, or occasionally three hours. So the best I could do was leave hours before I actually needed to be at work, allowing plenty of room for things to go horribly wrong, which they frequently did. It was a miserable existence for the entire time I did it, but it gave me some perspective and set a low bar for existence, which I hope to never go back to.

I did learn a thing or two about how to deal with this, and like the advice that this employee received, I found that the best thing I could do was to find things to do around work, before and after, so that I didn't have to waste as much time sitting in traffic. See the post that sparked this discussion below, followed by some of the helpful advice and responses.