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As South Africa accelerates its energy transition through renewable energy procurement and planned coal mine decommissioning, the Just Transition discourse has emerged as a framework to protect workers' rights during shifts toward low-carbon economies. Yet this framework operates largely through technocratic, top-down governance mechanisms that treat mining communities as statistical populations to be relocated from one economic sector to another. This ethnographic research challenges such approaches by foregrounding the lifeworlds of semi-skilled coal miners in KwaGuqa township, eMalahleni ("place of coal"), examining how miners feel, act, sense, struggle, and make meaning in their everyday lives amid fossil fuel decarbonisation. Drawing on Michael Jackson's existential anthropology of lifeworlds and Veena Das's concepts of ordinary ethics and social suffering, it questions how coal miners' embodied experiences reveal the epistemic violence and material contradictions embedded within global JT governance? Through twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork employing participant observation, life histories, and in-depth interviews, the research explores miners' emotions (pride, anger, hope, loss), daily practices and bodily rhythms, and adaptive struggles against declining production and uncertain futures. This research illuminates how miners navigate, reshape, or resist formal JT policies that contradict their lived socio-material realities. By centering miners' embodied knowledge, the study reveals what technocratic frameworks render invisible. Ultimately, this ethnography offers a phenomenologically grounded critique of dominant Just Transition paradigms, demonstrating how polarisation between global governance and grassroots lifeworlds exposes the limits of frameworks privileging procedural over existential justice, while revealing miners' alternative visions of what "green" and "just" mean from below.