As a 9-to-5er living in a congested city with zero organised transport systems like Lagos, you know that waking up at 4am is a survival skill.

Anything later than that and you are either rushing out of the house without having your bath (never do this, please, for the love of everyone on that bus) or you are stuck in traffic with strangers who are just as miserable as you are and far less polite about it.

You also know that a gym membership is largely unnecessary because jumping into a danfo at 6am is its own full-body workout.

Squatting over a seat, holding a rail for dear life, absorbing the shock of a pothole with your whole spine are all free exercises you get to do without paying a dime. Gym bros have nothing on you.

The commute alone deserves its own therapy session. You leave the house while it is still dark, while the rest of the world — the remote workers, the trust fund children, the people with "flexible hours" — are still asleep with their faces soft and unbothered.

You, however, are already at a bus stop, squinting into the distance for headlights, rehearsing the negotiation you are about to have with a conductor who will insist the fare went up overnight. It always goes up overnight. Nobody knows why. Nobody asks.

By the time you get to work, you have already lived a full episode. You have stood in a queue that had no structure. You have been elbowed by a woman with a very large bag and no remorse.

You have calculated, mid-traffic, whether your salary is actually worth this, and you have reached no satisfying conclusion. You sit down at your desk and someone says "good morning, how are you?" and you say "fine" because what else do you say?

You have been awake for four hours and you have not yet done a single thing that is for you.

The lunch break is a negotiation of its own. The food options within walking distance are either too expensive, too slow or both.

You eat at your desk. You scroll through your phone while eating at your desk. You see someone on Instagram on a yacht. You put your phone down. You pick it back up. The cycle continues.

By 3pm, time has stopped moving. You are not sure the clock is working. You refresh your email even though you are not expecting anything important, just to feel like something is happening. It is not.

At 4pm you begin the subtle art of looking busy while slowly packing your bag. You have learned this.

Everyone has learned this. It is a shared language.

That quiet sound from the running of the zip of a laptop bag, the casual positioning of a jacket over a chair. You are leaving at 5pm. You have always left at 5pm, but you have to perform the transition.

Then the commute home, which is somehow worse than the morning one. The traffic has had the entire day to organise itself into something truly unbearable.

The sun is setting directly into your eyes. The conductor is in a worse mood than he was this morning. The person beside you is on a phone call and they are not using their inside voice.

You stare out the window at the loud, chaotic city and you feel something that low, familiar tiredness.

You get home. You tell yourself you will do something productive — that side project, the online course, the workout, anything.

You sit down first, just for a minute, and then it is 10pm and you have done nothing except eat, lie flat, and watch three episodes of something you will not remember by Friday. You set your alarm for 4am. You close your eyes.

Tomorrow, you will do it again.

This is just Lagos and every other city where the roads are broken and the buses are held together by prayer and the workers are held together by even less.

The 9-to-5 in Nigeria is a personality, a commute, a negotiation and occasionally, a grief. But you show up. You always show up.

Because the rent is real and the bill is real and at least the jollof at that one canteen near the office is genuinely excellent.

Small mercies.