Quit Over a 4-Hour Commute: My Seoul Job and Panic Disorder

 

I quit a job in Seoul because of a commute that took close to four hours a day, and because I live with panic disorder. A long commute can be a real reason to leave a job, and in my case it was the deciding one. Here is what the numbers looked like, what it did to me, and what I'd check before accepting a job with a long trip.

How long was my commute, really?

At the fitness equipment company, getting to work took about an hour and a half each way. Plenty of people in the Seoul area live with numbers like that, and for a while I did too.

The trip home was the part I hadn't priced in properly. The work there was heavy, so I'd often be at my desk well into the night, and by the time I left, the transport on my route ran far enough apart that the ride back stretched toward two hours. Add the two directions together and it came to close to four hours a day in transit.

Then add the rest of the day around it. I was out of the house before seven in the morning, and on a night with overtime I wasn't home until after eleven. That is more than sixteen hours a day with the front door closed behind me, on a route that had no shorter version.

Over a year, four hours a day across a few hundred working days comes to something near nine hundred hours, more than thirty-five full days spent just moving between two places.

Why a long commute is harder with panic disorder

I've had panic disorder for about five years now. For most of that time I've managed it by arranging my life around what I could and couldn't do. I can't drive alone. Riding the subway is hard for me, on a good day and on a bad one.

Those two facts sit very badly next to a long commute. The obvious fix for a long trip, driving yourself, wasn't open to me. What was open was public transport, which is exactly the thing that costs me the most to use. So the four hours weren't four neutral hours that I was merely tired of. They were four hours a day inside the situation I find hardest, repeated every working day, after the longest days.

I've written before about the hours and the pay, the two dials I kept trying to turn up together. This was a third thing underneath both of them, and I'd never put it on the page: what the road itself was doing to me.

The day I decided to quit

Shortly before I resigned, I had a panic attack on the subway. I won't try to describe it, because I don't think I could do it justice, and it isn't really the point. The point is that after that, there was no longer any version of the arithmetic in which I could keep going. I had been managing something for years by staying inside certain limits, and a commute like that had pushed me past all of them at once.

The timing around me wasn't helping. The executive who had hired me was leaving the company around then, and when the person who brought you in is on the way out, you look at the whole arrangement again, including the parts you'd stopped questioning. But I want to be accurate about the order of things. That was background. The thing that actually decided it was the day on the subway.

So I left, after about a year there, on my own terms and without any drama. There was nothing bitter in how it ended, and I don't hold the company responsible for where it sits on a map. It was a bad fit between a long road and a condition I'd already been living with.

Can you tell an interviewer you quit because of the commute?

This connects to something I wrote earlier about the question every Korean interviewer eventually asks: why did you leave your last company. There is an answer you're expected to give, and it involves growth and challenge and direction. There is also the true answer. When the true answer is a panic attack on a train, it doesn't fit inside either one.

If I say it was the commute, it sounds small, even a little soft. If I say what it really was, I'm handing a stranger something I'd rather choose to share. So when it comes up, I give the shorter version. It isn't a lie, only a smaller true thing standing in for a bigger one.

What to check before you accept a job with a long commute

I'm writing this down because it's a place where I get to choose the size of the story, and because I wish I had asked myself a few plain questions earlier.

• How long is the trip in each direction at the hours you'll really travel, including the late ride home, not just the morning one?
• Is the way you'd travel one you can actually keep doing every day, or one that costs you more than it costs everyone else?
• How many hours will be left in your day once the road has taken its share?
• Does the job offer any flexibility, such as remote days or adjusted hours, and is it in writing?

I knew the salary of every company I joined down to the last won. For one of them, I never properly counted the road, and it ended up being the thing that decided everything.