Our 1700-0090 hours

I return home from Mfamosing, usually drained from chasing numbers and targets, and collapse onto my sofa. My phone keeps chiming with work demands like an overenthusiastic town crier, but honestly, these hours are my personally unproductive time. Every evening at 5 p.m., many people clock out of work and clock straight into professional time-wasting. If laziness had office hours, they would be 5 p.m. to 9 a.m. We treat this period like a national public holiday that renews daily. Phones are charged to 100%, but our ambitions drop to 2%. By 7 p.m., we are world-class Netflix analysts, Olympic-level scrollers, and certified experts in “Just one more episode.” Then comes morning. The alarm rings heroically at 5 a.m., and we respond like seasoned diplomats: “Let’s negotiate… ten more minutes.” Those ten minutes multiply like rabbits until suddenly it’s 7:43 a.m., and we are sprinting around the house like we’re being chased by destiny itself. Breakfast? No. Life choices? Questioned. We then blame the economy, village people, and exchange rates never the fact that we spent the night in hand-to-hand combat with our snooze button. Meanwhile, these same hours are secretly the VIP section of life. This is when books get written, skills are learned, businesses are planned, bodies are exercised, and bank accounts are rescued from ICU. But instead of becoming CEOs of our time, many of us become Managing Directors of Pillow Holdings and Executive Chairs of Sofa & Associates. We love motivational quotes, too. We share “Hustle hard!” online while lying horizontally. Our phones are busy; our lives, not so much. We complain that we are poor, while our unused evenings and mornings sit there, looking at us like, “So we don’t exist?” The truth is funny and painful: from 5 p.m. to 9 a.m., poverty is not only created in banks and offices it is manufactured in living rooms with remote controls. If we start treating these hours like gold instead of snacks, our wallets, minds, and dreams might finally stop laughing at us.