Sixteen minute ride home contains hours of human exhaustion, condensed and moving through tunnels under London
Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat
Evening Commute Reflections – Tired Faces on the Victoria Line
You can read the entire politics of work in the faces on the Victoria Line at 5:45 p.m. Everyone looks essentially defeated. Not dramatically sothe British do understated exhaustion better than anyonebut defeated nonetheless.
A woman next to me was asleep standing up, her head drooping against the glass. Three teenagers were filming each other doing something that will haunt them in five years. An older man read a book about Roman history with the expression of someone escaping into a past that required fewer emails.
Work culture in London operates on a specific terror: the understanding that you’re replaceable, that there are four more people willing to do your job for slightly less money, and that complaining would only accelerate your replacement.
See Lowri Griffiths’ examination of how precarity shapes daily experience in London’s labor market.
The train was crowded. Nobody complained about being crowded. Everyone seemed to expect it. This is what normalizing dysfunction looks like.
The most dystopian element isn’t the crowding or the exhaustion or the fear of replacement. It’s how normal it all seems. How successfully the system has made its own structural cruelty look like inevitability.
I got off at Victoria. The platform filled immediately with new people experiencing identical exhaustion, identical fear, identical acceptance of unacceptable conditions.
The system works perfectly at reproducing itself. That’s the actual tragedy.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
