"When you hear “balance,” you immediately think of a dichotomy. For two things to be balanceable, they must be at odds with each other. Lowering one side of the scale must raise the other side.
When we describe work and life as things to be balanced, we are suggesting that work and life are at odds with each other. More time or energy allocated to work means less time and energy allocated to life.
This is obviously absurd, though. Work is just another part of life like family, community, food, fitness, creativity, travel, fun, spirituality, etc.
The question isn’t how do you balance work and life, but how do you create a healthy relationship among work and the various other important areas of life? "
This is completely pedantic - obviously work is literally a part of life, so the phrase means exactly what the author states in the last paragraph.
I couldn't agree more. A previous company I worked for used to force push a day or two off every month for 'work-life balance'. I would throw my laptop on and do a bit of something that was annoying me because it's what I really wanted to do and at that particular time I was excited about solving it.
The next day I went into work and was super happy to explain how I solved the issue as it had been annoying the team for too long. I was a senior at the time but my lead called a meeting with me. He continued to berate me for working and telling others I was doing some work.
While I could see his point, some juniors might feel pressure to do the same, but it was how I wanted to enjoy my time. So after this, I really promote a work life balance but give the autonomy to the employee to find theirs.
Now with my team its very clear and unless there is something absolutely mission critical we always facilitate. Our productivity and reliability has gone through the roof, everyone is much more in control of their work.
I've also gotten this feedback from my boss, that I was accidentally setting a standard of prioritizing work in a way that might lead others to think that's what they should be doing. The way I handled it was when people were sharing what they had done in their off times (a) preferentially talking about interesting non-work things I'd done, (b) being clearly supportive of others doing non-work things, and (c) not being the first to bring up a story if I was going to be talking about work things. I also tried not to send work-related communication to others after hours if I was doing some work later in the day.
("I want to do work all the time" is not a way I usually feel. I've just as often had trouble working while at work, let alone keeping myself from working after hours. And there were also times when I was working fewer hours than was typical on the team but at odd hours that could erroneously have given the impression that I was working extra hours.)
I realize it’s what you WANT to do in your “free” time, but don’t be that guy. There’s no way for you to do that sort of thing, and then not have it create pressure for everyone else. I had a boss who would be working basically all the time until 9-10pm every night, and was often on during the weekends. He would always say things like “it’s Friday, call it a day and enjoy your weekend” as he would continue working. How am I not supposed to feel guilty, even if it’s his choice? To me, he’s making a sacrifice for me and the rest of the team, and I think it hurt morale, even though he probably intended the opposite.
I always like the phrasing "work life harmony". Work is not an opposing force to things that are not work. It is a thing we all have to do. Some of us like doing it, some don't, but I strive to help work finds its place in my life. There are trade offs and there is an act of balancing in some senses, but in the larger philosophical sense harmony just fits better for my world view.
First, so the fuck what? Is it so wrong to have different goals than "rise up the corporate ladder and make stacks on stacks on stacks"? It is not morally wrong to prioritize different things.
Second, if we consider "achievement" to be measured by income I have far better work-life balance as a software engineer than the person who cleans my house, despite me making 10x what she makes. There doesn't appear to be some global correlation between working hard or long hours and pay.
Working for money is imperative in most people's lives. The failure to do so carries a heavy stick including poverty, homelessness, health issues, the list goes on.
Contrary to the article, balance is impossible first because our economy and low-paying jobs are designed to lock people in them, creating a cycle of living paycheck to paycheck and barely surviving financially.
Work might be an important part of a life where it's not a person's top priority due to finance survival reasons, but would naturally be structured differently. Only in this privileged state is "balance" or "alignment" possible. Even so, I suspect not every healthy person would choose to work, given the opportunity to not.
> Contrary to the article, balance is impossible first because our economy and low-paying jobs are designed to lock people in them, creating a cycle of living paycheck to paycheck and barely surviving financially.
There is no conspiracy or design, that's just the reality of any economic system. No system has ever existed that didn't involve the vast majority of people working -- and it will always be the case unless we find a way to generate enough wealth to live on without doing work.
Every system has required most people to do work, but the character of work in the modern era is qualitatively different from the typical character of work throughout history.
Due to a number of good things inherited from the Soviet epoch. Working for money is imperative here too, but I would say it is bounding you on lesser extent.
University education is free, the government is fully subsidized a huge part of students. Base medicine is free, and the paid medicine of good quality is cheap even if you don't have regular Insurance. Electricity and other utility bills are relatively cheap. A number of common goods and food is cheaper than in the western countries. What's most important in my opinion that a lot of young people are inheriting real property from their grandparents. It's not always the house of your dream(usually small flats), but you gain a place to stay in and to start with for free.
And the country itself is relatively well developed in terms of common services and the opportunities you have around. By GDP(PPP) the country is around Germany[1].
All in all, here in Russia you may have an opportunity to make a work/life balance relatively easier than in Europe or North America.
It's sad to face that a lot of young people are looking for emigration.
I had been travelling a lot, and I was fascinated by the developed countries of the West too for many years when I was younger. I don't want to underestimate the opportunities you may have abroad, and also I don't want to underestimate the problems we have here in Russia. But honestly speaking in my opinion it is much harder to survive in the West than in the post-soviet countries.
I am reminded of Boris Yeltsin visiting an American grocery store.
“When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people.” - Yeltsin (autobiography)
> it is much harder to survive in the West than in the post-soviet countries
I don't imagine it is hard to survive in either place.
How about the fact that, if you're a man, government thugs on any given day can come for you and send you to a war in Ukraine where you'll have to fight until you die or get badly maimed? That alone sounds like a good enough reason to leave the country (at least temporarily).
>Contrary to the article, balance is impossible first because our economy and low-paying jobs are designed to lock people in them, creating a cycle of living paycheck to paycheck and barely surviving financially.
I would add government incentives to the list. Welfare benefit cliffs [1] are a real issue as well. If your net income plus benefits is higher with a 20k income than a 60k income, you have very little incentive to improve your earnings, especially if you have children that depend on your benefits.
> Contrary to the article, balance is impossible first because our economy and low-paying jobs are designed to lock people in them, creating a cycle of living paycheck to paycheck and barely surviving financially.
> designed [emphasis mine]
I'm not so sure it's designed so much as an emergent phenomena.
The world has gotten so caught up in value creation that it rewards the roles that are most able to create value or the roles that are non-fungible and necessary.
Because of globalization and immigration, the "non-skilled" jobs are conceivably not just available to 16 year old high school students. Immigrants that are just reaching the country and establishing their foothold increase the pool of available labor.
The increasing gulf between high paying and low paying jobs is a result of offshoring manufacturing and other types of labor that can be easily purchased at a substantially lower rate on the worldwide market. This has happened because our very own consumers want cheaper goods. And in the big picture, it's not a bad thing - every nation that follows the industrialization pattern has rapidly pulled themselves out of poverty and built up a strong, educated workforce.
> Even so, I suspect not every healthy person would choose to work, given the opportunity to not.
Personally speaking, if I had the freedom not to work, I would perhaps pursue my own goals or hobbies which may not bring value to the world in the most optimal way. It might even subtract.
People were locked into work long before there was an economy to speak of. They were hunting, gathering, subsistence farming, spending hours gathering materials and building things from dusk till dawn. Even the poor are generally able to work much less than the historical baseline.
I'm not saying the modern economy is fair. It's just easy to lose sight of the fact that it inherently takes a lot of work to live.
> The world has gotten so caught up in value creation that it rewards the roles that are most able to create value or the roles that are non-fungible and necessary.
God I wish that were true. What would you prefer the world reward, other than value creation? Currently the world rewards whoever just already owns everything or whoever is the best at taking advantage of others; value creation has virtually nothing to do with it. A fast-food worker is creating value by preparing tasty fries; Mark Zuckerberg maybe created some value by helping people stay connected, but that's overwhelmingly outweighed by his value destruction if you look at his overall impact on the world.
> if I had the freedom not to work, I would perhaps pursue my own goals or hobbies which may not bring value to the world in the most optimal way
We have very different definitions of "value" then, because I suspect people pursuing their own goals and hobbies is one of the best ways to create value in the world. Of course we also need vast cooperation to create valuable things like the James Webb Space Telescope.
It just sounds like you're dramatically over-estimating how much "value" is produced by (A) the current top caste of rent-seekers leveraging the vast amounts of wealth they were born into into even more wealth by taking advantage of their fellow humans as much as possible, and (B) the vast amount of bullshit jobs that are literally worthless busywork. If you're sitting around writing poetry or building train sets, you're way ahead of both those groups in terms of "value creation".
> Even so, I suspect not every healthy person would choose to work, given the opportunity to not.
I agree with a lot of what you said, but I don't this that's a good argument that work is bad or unhealthy. I think most people would choose to do something else with their time spent at work if they had the opportunity, but they choose to work because the benefits they receive from working are better than the lifestyle they'd have if they were not working.
That trade off of doing something we don't enjoy to gain a result we do enjoy isn't unique to work though. I suspect that most people wouldn't eat healthy or exercise if they didn't have to.
There is NO point in living paycheck to paycheck, because eventually you will be unable to work and will have to pay the piper for not saving for retirement/an emergency.
If people have to choose between living paycheck to paycheck or living in a smaller house/driving an older car/not eating out as much, the choice should be clear, but it’s not to most people.
"Making friends at work or coworking with friends can help support relationships and fun." And one day, it just isn't fun. Who do turn to for support? Will your friends be there when you quit your job? And to the contrary: If your friend, family and co-workers are all the same, how will you cope at work when going through a divorce?
I'd say there's a meta-balance to be had here. If you over-integrate your "buckets", you're removing redundancy from your life.
The only interactions I have had from past coworkers in 10 years of working full time is one of them occasionally likes a post I make on LinkedIn. YMMV.
Agree with earlier commenters. OP uses lots of words to suggest what's really a one-word tweak: "Work-life alignment" covers the key concepts in a way that "work-life balance" does not.
My best years have been ingeniously unbalanced -- with many months of sprinting to get a work project done, offset by a month of trekking in Nepal. That was a keeper.
Author makes three fatal assumptions. One is a category error of work and life, the second is what work-life balance means in practice, and the third is for whom work-life balance advice applies.
The category error raises its head in the line, "Work is just another part of life like family, community, food, fitness, creativity, travel, fun, spirituality, etc." The author seems to group together all activities one does under the same umbrella as if that makes them equal. We already know they aren't because we often point out the distinction the evergreen antimetabole, "Do you live to work or work to live?"
The point of pointing this distinction out is precisely to make one examine one's priorities. It's easy to make excuses at home for time spent at work, but typically much harder to make excuses[1] at work for time spent at home. Excuses is a poor way to phrase this, but it highlights exactly the problem of putting work and life on the same level. If you cringe at reading the phrase "excuses at work" it's because work and home have this difference. Rather, we usually say "setting time boundaries on work" because we see work as one thing and life as another.
Finally, we must acknowledge that this boundary setting and it's formulation comes easier to some and harder to others. When the author attempts to universalize his advice, ignoring context, it ceases to be useful. Setting work boundaries is crucial to folks for whom boundary setting is more difficult. But to omit this is the final nail in the coffin of the author's bad advice.
In my own experience, personal growth came from doing exactly the opposite of what the author suggests. If instead, I had blindly taken his advice, I'd risk losing everything I hold dear. That's why it's bad advice.
I suspect 4DWW - Four Day Work Week - would tremendously help in achieving a better work life balance. Having worked many weeks that way made a tremendous difference in my life and happiness.
I think this is an extremely privileged view. The problem is many people are forced to work 80+ hours a week OR risk losing their immigration status, access to healthcare, and many other things. They have literally zero time left for activities that are restorative to mental health. Having your work be something you "love" to do is an incredibly privileged position to have. A few people can do it. The vast majority of the population cannot. Even those that do it usually run into mental health issues at the point where their "loved" career gets entangled with customer and political issues, if they cannot emotionally extricate themselves from their careers.
And be careful before telling someone that they can just change their job. Changing jobs is easy if you're a citizen, the economy is in good shape, and you have a bit of a financial cushion to get you through a couple unemployed months. For a lot of others, it's hard.
The bottom line is TIME is a finite, zero-sum resource, and there's no way to change that. It has to be a balance in terms of time allocation at the least.
This is good stuff to think about, but I still do think the "balance" framework is a good one because it's a simple one. At the very least, if you can reach a state where you are able to budget work TIME and non-work TIME, many of the other things the article talks about will naturally fall into place without having to think too much.
Kinda click-baity and not a lot of substance, prob not worth the 5 min reading it. Article TLDR - work is part of life (duh) and you're just trying to integrate everything.
Readit News
"When you hear “balance,” you immediately think of a dichotomy. For two things to be balanceable, they must be at odds with each other. Lowering one side of the scale must raise the other side.
When we describe work and life as things to be balanced, we are suggesting that work and life are at odds with each other. More time or energy allocated to work means less time and energy allocated to life.
This is obviously absurd, though. Work is just another part of life like family, community, food, fitness, creativity, travel, fun, spirituality, etc.
The question isn’t how do you balance work and life, but how do you create a healthy relationship among work and the various other important areas of life? "
This is completely pedantic - obviously work is literally a part of life, so the phrase means exactly what the author states in the last paragraph.
Not worth reading IMO.
The next day I went into work and was super happy to explain how I solved the issue as it had been annoying the team for too long. I was a senior at the time but my lead called a meeting with me. He continued to berate me for working and telling others I was doing some work.
While I could see his point, some juniors might feel pressure to do the same, but it was how I wanted to enjoy my time. So after this, I really promote a work life balance but give the autonomy to the employee to find theirs.
Now with my team its very clear and unless there is something absolutely mission critical we always facilitate. Our productivity and reliability has gone through the roof, everyone is much more in control of their work.
("I want to do work all the time" is not a way I usually feel. I've just as often had trouble working while at work, let alone keeping myself from working after hours. And there were also times when I was working fewer hours than was typical on the team but at odd hours that could erroneously have given the impression that I was working extra hours.)
Deleted Comment
https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/top-performers-have-a-su...
While balance isn't required for happiness, I know many imbalanced, unhappy and underachieving people.
Second, if we consider "achievement" to be measured by income I have far better work-life balance as a software engineer than the person who cleans my house, despite me making 10x what she makes. There doesn't appear to be some global correlation between working hard or long hours and pay.
Contrary to the article, balance is impossible first because our economy and low-paying jobs are designed to lock people in them, creating a cycle of living paycheck to paycheck and barely surviving financially.
Work might be an important part of a life where it's not a person's top priority due to finance survival reasons, but would naturally be structured differently. Only in this privileged state is "balance" or "alignment" possible. Even so, I suspect not every healthy person would choose to work, given the opportunity to not.
There is no conspiracy or design, that's just the reality of any economic system. No system has ever existed that didn't involve the vast majority of people working -- and it will always be the case unless we find a way to generate enough wealth to live on without doing work.
We work like crazy[1], the machine should continue moving: we are fat but it costs us a lot.
[1] https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...
nonsense - games run by game rules
Due to a number of good things inherited from the Soviet epoch. Working for money is imperative here too, but I would say it is bounding you on lesser extent.
University education is free, the government is fully subsidized a huge part of students. Base medicine is free, and the paid medicine of good quality is cheap even if you don't have regular Insurance. Electricity and other utility bills are relatively cheap. A number of common goods and food is cheaper than in the western countries. What's most important in my opinion that a lot of young people are inheriting real property from their grandparents. It's not always the house of your dream(usually small flats), but you gain a place to stay in and to start with for free.
And the country itself is relatively well developed in terms of common services and the opportunities you have around. By GDP(PPP) the country is around Germany[1].
All in all, here in Russia you may have an opportunity to make a work/life balance relatively easier than in Europe or North America.
It's sad to face that a lot of young people are looking for emigration.
I had been travelling a lot, and I was fascinated by the developed countries of the West too for many years when I was younger. I don't want to underestimate the opportunities you may have abroad, and also I don't want to underestimate the problems we have here in Russia. But honestly speaking in my opinion it is much harder to survive in the West than in the post-soviet countries.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)
I am reminded of Boris Yeltsin visiting an American grocery store.
“When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people.” - Yeltsin (autobiography)
> it is much harder to survive in the West than in the post-soviet countries
I don't imagine it is hard to survive in either place.
There is more to life than surviving.
I would add government incentives to the list. Welfare benefit cliffs [1] are a real issue as well. If your net income plus benefits is higher with a 20k income than a 60k income, you have very little incentive to improve your earnings, especially if you have children that depend on your benefits.
https://fee.org/articles/if-you-accept-this-raise-you-fall-o...
> designed [emphasis mine]
I'm not so sure it's designed so much as an emergent phenomena.
The world has gotten so caught up in value creation that it rewards the roles that are most able to create value or the roles that are non-fungible and necessary.
Because of globalization and immigration, the "non-skilled" jobs are conceivably not just available to 16 year old high school students. Immigrants that are just reaching the country and establishing their foothold increase the pool of available labor.
The increasing gulf between high paying and low paying jobs is a result of offshoring manufacturing and other types of labor that can be easily purchased at a substantially lower rate on the worldwide market. This has happened because our very own consumers want cheaper goods. And in the big picture, it's not a bad thing - every nation that follows the industrialization pattern has rapidly pulled themselves out of poverty and built up a strong, educated workforce.
> Even so, I suspect not every healthy person would choose to work, given the opportunity to not.
Personally speaking, if I had the freedom not to work, I would perhaps pursue my own goals or hobbies which may not bring value to the world in the most optimal way. It might even subtract.
I'm not saying the modern economy is fair. It's just easy to lose sight of the fact that it inherently takes a lot of work to live.
God I wish that were true. What would you prefer the world reward, other than value creation? Currently the world rewards whoever just already owns everything or whoever is the best at taking advantage of others; value creation has virtually nothing to do with it. A fast-food worker is creating value by preparing tasty fries; Mark Zuckerberg maybe created some value by helping people stay connected, but that's overwhelmingly outweighed by his value destruction if you look at his overall impact on the world.
> if I had the freedom not to work, I would perhaps pursue my own goals or hobbies which may not bring value to the world in the most optimal way
We have very different definitions of "value" then, because I suspect people pursuing their own goals and hobbies is one of the best ways to create value in the world. Of course we also need vast cooperation to create valuable things like the James Webb Space Telescope.
It just sounds like you're dramatically over-estimating how much "value" is produced by (A) the current top caste of rent-seekers leveraging the vast amounts of wealth they were born into into even more wealth by taking advantage of their fellow humans as much as possible, and (B) the vast amount of bullshit jobs that are literally worthless busywork. If you're sitting around writing poetry or building train sets, you're way ahead of both those groups in terms of "value creation".
I agree with a lot of what you said, but I don't this that's a good argument that work is bad or unhealthy. I think most people would choose to do something else with their time spent at work if they had the opportunity, but they choose to work because the benefits they receive from working are better than the lifestyle they'd have if they were not working.
That trade off of doing something we don't enjoy to gain a result we do enjoy isn't unique to work though. I suspect that most people wouldn't eat healthy or exercise if they didn't have to.
If people have to choose between living paycheck to paycheck or living in a smaller house/driving an older car/not eating out as much, the choice should be clear, but it’s not to most people.
I'd say there's a meta-balance to be had here. If you over-integrate your "buckets", you're removing redundancy from your life.
It is self-defeating to avoid becoming friendly with anyone you do work with, though.
And for what it's worth, my work friends were indeed very supportive when I quit past jobs. Leaving the job didn't end our friendships.
My best years have been ingeniously unbalanced -- with many months of sprinting to get a work project done, offset by a month of trekking in Nepal. That was a keeper.
The category error raises its head in the line, "Work is just another part of life like family, community, food, fitness, creativity, travel, fun, spirituality, etc." The author seems to group together all activities one does under the same umbrella as if that makes them equal. We already know they aren't because we often point out the distinction the evergreen antimetabole, "Do you live to work or work to live?"
The point of pointing this distinction out is precisely to make one examine one's priorities. It's easy to make excuses at home for time spent at work, but typically much harder to make excuses[1] at work for time spent at home. Excuses is a poor way to phrase this, but it highlights exactly the problem of putting work and life on the same level. If you cringe at reading the phrase "excuses at work" it's because work and home have this difference. Rather, we usually say "setting time boundaries on work" because we see work as one thing and life as another.
Finally, we must acknowledge that this boundary setting and it's formulation comes easier to some and harder to others. When the author attempts to universalize his advice, ignoring context, it ceases to be useful. Setting work boundaries is crucial to folks for whom boundary setting is more difficult. But to omit this is the final nail in the coffin of the author's bad advice.
In my own experience, personal growth came from doing exactly the opposite of what the author suggests. If instead, I had blindly taken his advice, I'd risk losing everything I hold dear. That's why it's bad advice.
And be careful before telling someone that they can just change their job. Changing jobs is easy if you're a citizen, the economy is in good shape, and you have a bit of a financial cushion to get you through a couple unemployed months. For a lot of others, it's hard.
The bottom line is TIME is a finite, zero-sum resource, and there's no way to change that. It has to be a balance in terms of time allocation at the least.
This is good stuff to think about, but I still do think the "balance" framework is a good one because it's a simple one. At the very least, if you can reach a state where you are able to budget work TIME and non-work TIME, many of the other things the article talks about will naturally fall into place without having to think too much.