From Thinker — Your Driver by Day, Dreamer by Night
Semi‑fantasy notes from a world that looks like ours—only the dreams speak louder, and the wires of control hum just beneath the pavement.
🌞 Daylight: The Driver
By day, I’m your friendly neighbour who waves at the crossroads and knows which entry buzzer actually works. I load parcels, find doorways, read the tiny names on the tiny bells, and try to bring a little kindness with every knock. I love the road—always have. The ribbon of tarmac, the geometry of turns, the way the sun paints the edge of a van’s mirror—these small harmonies kept me moving when money was thin and tools charged monthly like hungry moons.
“So I had to remove this from my heart so it would be solved with what I can do with what I have, even when I can’t do much.”
Existence is not cheap. Creativity is not cheap. Rest is not cheap. To keep studying healing and keep the lights on, I became a delivery driver. Back then, the world still felt like a gentle paradise. Then the weather changed—first in the air, then in the rules.
🌙 Nightfall: The Dreamer
By night, I listen to the cities breathe. I trace the ache along their avenues, the tension coiled inside stairwells and storage rooms. I patch people’s spirits with quiet rituals: breath before blame, water before worry, touch before talk. I mend what slips through the cracks of policy and punctuality.
Sometimes, when the moon is high and the wires hiss, I fight corruption for fun—nothing dramatic, just reality gently rearranged: locks that don’t quite close for those who would cage, windows that do open for those who need wind. A lamp refocuses; a camera blinks; a watchman remembers his childhood and goes home early. Small corrections. Human scale.
🕯️ The Shift: When Seeds Became Tentacles
The seeds of trouble were small—barely visible in the soil. Over time they sprouted into places of unrest, then tentacles, then full control. Illusions settled onto people like invisible glasses: everyone busy, everyone sick, everyone told the ache was normal and the heat was “only a warning on the app.” Water stood locked behind glass “for savings,” while the weather demanded courage and salt and shade.
Once, driving felt beautiful—landscapes, respectful hellos, shared time. Then a kill switch flipped. Distress became standard. Cars bruised and bills multiplied. Extra work, extra rules, no extra time. You were punished if you obeyed the numbers and punished if you didn’t. “Properly,” you could do fifty stops. The system handed you two hundred and told you to smile. Earnings looked like income but acted like disguised revenue—costs everywhere, pension nowhere, a thousand‑money penalty for a plastic cover because “our site takes five days.”
Charging a van in daylight became an aesthetic crime; the depot called it pollution and banned the rest. Sleep deprivation wasn’t an accident; it was a feature. Drivers began to fall—on roads, in comments, and in silence. And when a driver dies, the chorus arrives: “Stupid driver. Should have learned.” The chorus never learns.
Like the famous Survivorship Bias plane diagram.
“What’s it like working at Amazon?”
Well, imagine this: your alarm goes off at 2:15 a.m. — not because you’re chasing dreams, but because you need to be at work before the rest of the world even wakes up. You arrive before 3 a.m., start at 6, and on paper, you’re supposed to finish at 1 p.m.
Reality check? You finish when they say you’re done. Free overtime — or you’re “not a team player.” Most days, that means clocking out around 3 p.m., drained but not yet done. Then it’s off to charge in a different city — because apparently someone thinks it’s fun to send you on a two-hour detour after a ten-hour shift.
You finish charging around 8 p.m., drag yourself home, and collapse into bed near 10 p.m., just in time to enjoy a luxurious four hours of sleep before the alarm screams again.
Other routes usually start around 10 AM and finish only when the last driver returns — sometimes as late as 10 PM. By the time we get home, it’s already 11 PM or even midnight — just enough time to collapse into bed before waking up early to do it all over again.
Oh, and if you’re thirsty — better bring a thick wallet. Two euros for a 500 ml bottle of water, slightly more expensive than diesel. Hydration is a privilege, not a benefit.
Feeling sick? That’s fine — they’ll just take your van, your vin number without telling you and keep using it while you’re “off work.” Because apparently everything you pay for — fuel, maintenance, time, health — is fair game for them to take for free.
You’re not compensated for fuel costs.
They earn from you — about £1 or €1.20 per kWh, roughly the same as diesel, but 3 times more expensive.
So electric drivers end up paying 2–3 times more than diesel costs, forced to charge at inflated prices with no reimbursement.
In the end, fuel alone eats up around 40% of your wages. The rest disappears into insurance, loan payments, and fees — until there’s nothing left. People go bankrupt while working full time.
It’s a system built for pure efficiency — but only for them, not for those who actually keep it running.
They even admit to global outages and major bugs — glitches that make things vanish over and over again.
It feels less like a real company and more like a goldmine for kids tinkering with code for proffit — except real workers are trusting it, putting their lifes on the line.
Well, maybe they’ll fix it next month.
Well, it’s not all bad news — it’s not just the drivers dropping like flies or going bankrupt while working. The dispatchers are dying too...
They work six days a week — and if that sixth day happens to be a national holiday, tough luck. No bonus, no gratitude — just the same scolding as usual.
As for the pay… sometimes drivers earn up to eight times less than what a full day’s work should bring. Why? Because someone higher up “needed” a little extra, and the money had to come from somewhere.
But try to speak up, and you’ll quickly learn — no one cares, or at least no one’s allowed to.
Also, over time they force you to buy a new van, claiming your old one is “too old” — even when it still works perfectly fine. If you refuse, you’re simply fired.
Once drivers take massive lifetime loans to get new vans, the real abuse begins. They block you from working, yet still use your van in the system as if you were active. The owner is left drained of money, hope, and strength — forbidden to work, yet the van keeps earning for others.
From each “new van” registered in the system, they get more delivery volume, but it’s not given to the actual driver. Instead, it’s redistributed to others, some of whom burn out or even die on the job — but the system doesn’t care. There are always more people to replace them. It’s brutally efficient, and extremely profitable.
A few hundred pounds taken from each person daily — multiplied by thousands — and you see how deep the game really goes.
But then I started to wonder — this is a government-linked organization, yet there’s no real development, no progress. The same outdated templates are still in use, nothing truly evolves, and somehow they still operate in deficit. On top of that — minus 40 trillion. Just think: 1 trillion is a 1000 billion.
They clearly don’t understand what real business is. They just take money from drivers, exploit their effort, and call it “work.” But that’s not progress — it’s extraction.
Then it hit me — this is an extremely dangerous job. Only the physically and mentally strongest can endure it; others collapse on their first day with heart issues or brain blockages.
And if this strongest group of people — millions of them — are being systematically abused, drained, and discarded… what happens next? The nation’s backbone breaks.
If the strongest no longer have a life — if their children grow up weakened and hopeless —
then what’s left?
It’s not just exploitation.
It’s a country being slowly ground down, its strength erased into extinction.
Drivers also end up spying a lot — each driver takes hundreds of photos every day: houses, cars, backyards, private property.
Multiply that by millions of drivers, and you realize — it’s a massive, silent surveillance network, running every single day.
Welcome to the Amazon experience:
you pay, they profit — and call it efficiency.
What about the police and such?
Well, as I said before — it’s a massive business. Silence itself has become profitable.
In the UK, I learned there’s nothing truly united about it. Every city feels like its own small kingdom with different flags, where laws are more illusion than order — everything divided, extracted, and hidden under a single name.
I also know a few way cooler websites than theirs — built by a small, almost invisible nation, with a population so tiny it’s practically a rounding‑error speck of dust on the world map. Check out varle.lt and pigu.lt — proof that quality doesn’t need numbers, just some loving people.
Also: Daily drive · Just another day
I’m not writing this just for myself. There are millions of last-mile drivers — each one a moving link in this vast conveyor of a system. In fact, there are roughly two–four times more last‑mile drivers in the United Kingdom alone than there are Lithuanians in the entire world.
👁️ What I Saw (and How I Learned to Defend)
The e‑commerce site is a tool—nothing more. Buildings are on the ground; items belong to people. But the hands gripping the tool learned to harvest pain and call it efficiency. My heart wanted to lash out; my hands chose to build. I observed, I learned, and I’m leaving a map for anyone who needs one.
- Illusions thrive on speed. Slow one breath, then one decision. Naming the trick weakens the trick.
- Exhaustion is a gate. Guard it—water, food, shade. Refuse to trade your pulse for someone else’s convenience.
- Micro‑boundaries work. Ten seconds before the next bell. One stretch per stairwell. Small mercies become armor.
- Witness each other. A real “How are you?” disrupts the script that turns humans into logistics.
- Truth in plain sight. Say what is happening without ornaments. Truth doesn’t need makeup to be powerful.
🏬 The Site Is Just a Site
This is just another e‑commerce site where you buy things. It is not a temple. It is not a country. It is not the sky. The items do not belong to the site. Sellers still sell. Drivers still drive. People still receive what they need. If a tool harvests pain, we can put the tool down and pick up a better one.
Three Paths to Replace a Broken Tool
- Long Path (1–2 years): Prepare and phase out slowly. Migrate sellers and buyers with patience and documentation. Boring, steady, survivable.
- Mid Path (a few months): Shift to existing marketplaces (even auctions). Use local shops meanwhile. People adapt quicker than the rules expect.
- Swift Path (right now): If disregard for life crosses the line, institutions can pivot overnight—tariffs and tender move, new platforms step in, and links go out by SMS. Only the web address changes. Sellers still sell. Drivers still drive. People still get what they want.
You can buy a USB stick at your local store. You can buy directly from other countries—or from sites like ours that connect you closer to makers— often much cheaper, sometimes even two to four times. Maybe it takes a few days more. Time is a currency too; sometimes it buys dignity.
💪 What Changes for People (When the Tool Changes)
- Drivers: fair routes, fair rest—often double the wages, and a real chance to come home safe. The wheel becomes a circle again, not a noose.
- People: lower prices in practice, parcels carried by humans who still feel human.
- Country: revenue that isn’t shaved off the exhausted. Fewer ambulances. More birthdays.
Transition would look ordinary from the street. Parcels still arrive. The difference is invisible but felt: the absence of dread. The presence of choice.
🧭 Field Notes for Drivers & Dreamers
- Carry kindness like a spare key. It opens more doors than codes do.
- Hydrate before the route. If water is behind glass, plan your own well—bottle, thermos, refill map.
- Name the demand. “This deadline asks me to break the law.” Saying it out loud breaks its spell.
- Use the pause. Ten counts at each threshold—breath resets perception.
- Refuse the shame. Needing rest is not a defect; it’s proof you are still alive.
💗 Moving On (Without Forgetting)
I don’t want to spend my mind on rage; my heart already did the math. I solved what I could with what I had. Now I choose love as my study and the world as my classroom. I keep driving because I love the motion. I keep healing because I love the stillness it gives others. I keep writing because someone, somewhere, is looking for a sentence that lets them breathe.
If my van is beautiful or not—I’ll let the world decide. In the meantime, I’ll keep the engine kind, the words honest, and the nights brave.
🤝 How You Can Help Today
- Buy mindfully. Choose platforms and shops that treat people as people.
- When a driver knocks, offer a smile—or a glass of water if it’s hot. It matters.
- If a tool harvests pain, replace the tool. The sky won’t fall. The parcels will still arrive.
- Share this story with someone who thinks there’s no alternative. There always is.
— From Thinker, your friendly neighbour driver by day, dreamer by night