Work-Life Fallacy
For the last couple decades and especially over the last one or so, the idea of "work-life" balance has been mentioned as something to find. But the problem with looking for it, is that it is like looking for a unicorn, a dragon, or the perfect partner - it doesn't exist.
It doesn't exist because there is just life. That is it. You or I do not have separate lives that we live in different places, nor do we change who we are in different situations, or around different people. You are always you, I am always me, but it sometimes feels like we do shift who we are, and how we behave. But it is a fallacy, we don't.
But in order to make sense of our world, we humans mentally compartmentalise, slicing up our experience into chunks that we can understand. We do this in many ways, like creating definitions and terms for things in order to distinguish one item from another, or one space from another, or one time from another. If we don't make these distinctions, our experience becomes incomprehensible.
However, this compartmentalisation brings with it issues that effect us in multiple ways. For instance, when we create definitions, those definitions can warp and change over time, even when we are the ones who made them ourselves. Factor in 8 billion people and shifting behaviour, and there can be a wide range of understanding about the meaning for a single term, where it gets used as originally intended, all the way through the spectrum to altogether incorrect.
Similarly, despite us separating past, present and future, only the present actually matters, because that is the only time that we are able to live and affect. People say "you need to live in the now" as if there is some other option. There is not. The past informs the present and is gone, and the future has not yet been lived. In fact, at least by my estimation, time itself does not exist at all, because if we were to break it down to its smallest unit (which is impossible) it is zero. That means nothing is moving, everything is dead, and nothing will move.
Think about it a little and you should understand, if you don't yet.
Anyway, then we also breakdown our spaces into pieces, as well as our experiences within those spaces - like work space and home space and personal space. Isn't all space person from your experience? And then, if all space is personal and we are always us, there isn't a work version of us and a home version of us, there is just us. Me.
Singular.
While it is convenient to compartmentalise our experience, we seem to often create a fantasy where the compartments don't overlap and affect each other. For instance, people talk about work-life balance where they look to limit their work to improve their personal life, but very few acknowledge that their personal life affects their work life. And I make this distinction knowing, that there are not two lives, there is just life. You live when you are at work, you live when you are at home, and each part of the equation is going to affect the whole outcome.
If you have a bad day at work, you might bring a bad mood home with you. But if you have a fight with your partner, you will take that mood into work with you too. Depending on your skills and strategies, you might be able to mitigate the negative effects, but many people cannot because they haven't built the skillset to be able to. Yet, they still believe they are able to compartmentalise, because mentally they have made the distinction between areas, even if their own behaviours do not adhere to the definitions.
I remember when I started going to the gym at around 18 years of age. I was very ill at the time, and very skinny. I got a little bit stronger I thought, but I was sick, there was only so much I could do. One day, I was working out there alone (I was usually with a group of friends) and a big, muscly bloke came up to me as I was benching sixty kilos and said, "I think you can do more than that - I'll spot you". He put on another 20kg and said "Don't worry, I've got it". I pushed hard and to my own surprise, I was able to push it. No spot required. Then he said, "I think you can do more" and put on another twenty kilos.
That was the first time I pushed 100 kilos.
In this case, I had underestimated my capabilities because my definitions about what I am and what I can do created beliefs that held me back. My compartmentalisation meant that I didn't even consider that it was possible for me to lift that much. What the big guy did was support me to reach more of my potential, even though I didn't believe I could. The problem comes because if it was left to me to decide what I could and couldn't do, I would never have even attempted to do more.
After that at the gym, I started exploring more of my physical limits, rather than stay mentally limited. And since then, I have furthered that exploration into more mental and emotional aspects of my life, to reach for more of my potential. I fail often, but when I do, there isn't an external excuse, there is just me to blame. But "blame" isn't the right word - I don't blame myself. Rather, I acknowledge that I haven't the skills yet, or perhaps I never will have the skills. I might be incapable of getting them, or I might be unwilling to get them.
The unexamined life is not worth living.
Socrates
When searching this phrase, the explanation provided is:
The quote "the unexamined life is not worth living" is attributed to Socrates and suggests that a life lacking self-reflection, introspection, and critical thinking is devoid of meaning and value. It encourages individuals to question their beliefs, actions, and purpose in life to live more authentically and purposefully.
But have a look at that definition of the phrase and recognise that it is compartmentalising what life is. People tend to only see the reflection as a mental and emotional application, but it applies to life - All of life - Physical, mental, spiritual, fantastical. Life is a whole, not a series of pieces, and if we do not acknowledge and act on this, we will fall into the trap of limiting ourselves out of convenience, and overestimating the importance of the irrelevant. If one facet of the whole is out of alignment,
There is no life balance.
Taraz
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Dear @tarazkp !
Would you sacrifice your present for the happy future of your family?
I remember you sacrificing significant personal time and money in your life to leave Smallsteps your home as an inheritance!
Yes.
That is good!😃
Hmm, this is deep. The idea that work-life balance doesn’t actually exist because we only have one life is very true. We often try to separate work and personal life, but in reality, everything is connected. Our mood at home affects how we act at work and vice versa. Just like your experience at the gym and how you were able to navigate things with the support you received which shows how our own thoughts can limit what we believe we can do until someone challenges us to do more.
I think we are sum total of our experience and our attitude to life. I agree that life isn’t about dividing everything into neat boxes. It's all one big experience, and we need to reflect on every part of it, not just mentally but also physically and emotionally. And if we want to live a meaningful life, we need to start questioning our purpose in life. Why do some things not work and what we need to do to make it work. Living a life of purpose is what we have to be deliberate about. We can't just live our life on default and believe everything will work out just on luck on chance. We shouldn't leave everything to chance. We should create an ideal life we wanted for ourselves.
The more we try to disconnect and put into vacuums, the worse our life becomes.
Which raises the question about forgiveness too. Is a person a single negative action they performed, or are they the accumulation of all actions?
Act with intention. If it doesn't work as intended, that is okay. Act again with intention.
Quite deep but also very true. Thanks for sharing your thoughts...
I know I'm not going to convince you, because you can be very stubborn when it comes to the definition of things (re : empathy vs compassion), but I think work-life balance does exist. It's not a unicorn, it's just a normal thing people have to manage.
I've had projects where the deadlines were extremely aggressive, and to meet those deadlines we all had to put in so much work, at one point I worked 24 hours straight. Our work-life balance was terrible, everyone was miserable, but we got it done. At the time we were proud of what we accomplished... but we all know there was a huge cost to our lives.
In hindsight though, I wish I had pushed back or left that project, because all we did is confirm to management that they can abuse us and get away with it.
Now I'd prefer to let a project fail if they set unrealistic timelines because I don't see any reason why they should be successful after failing to plan appropriately.
Good leaders ensure their staff have a good work-life balance by protecting them from unreasonable requests, and bad leaders ask or demand their staff to work more than they are getting paid to.
Is it still stubbornness if I am right? ;P
Life is a thing they have to manage. The separation between different experiences of living doesn't exist.
Your life was terrible at that time and then you were glad you made it through and accomplished, even though there was a cost to get that feeling.
It is just life. It is singular.
For sure. This is about taking control of your life and knowing your boundaries, capabilities etc. However, what incentive would you need to push through and get it done? More money, an extended vacation, if it was for something like a step toward curing cancer? What is your cost-reward structure?
Maybe when younger, you didn't value yourself as much as you do now.
At least as far as you and I are concerned, we aren't forced to work for a particular company. We always have options in life.
I understand what you're saying, but I think ultimately the phrase 'work-life balance' is just shorthand for "I'm spending too much time at work and its disrupting the other parts of my life that are also important to me but that I've been neglecting".
If I tell people that my work-life balance in my current role is good, they instantly understand that I'm able to spend time on a range of things that are important to me (friends, family, hobbies, sleep, etc) but if I tell people that a previous role had a terrible work-life balance, they instantly understand I wasn't happy with the hours I was spending on work.
You can totally argue that both of those scenarios are just good-life and bad-life, but the phrase 'work-life balance' is efficient for these descriptions and doesn't require additional explanation.
This is what I disagree with, because I think people use it that way when they speak, but their behaviours say something else. They are blaming their workplace as the problem, but that is rarely even close to the full story. As fucked as so many workplaces might be, the problem isn't in the workplace for the most part, because they are working on a known algorithm of profit maximisation. Any employee can jump ship - but the vast majority do not. If all the unhappy employees jumped though, burnout wouldn't happen, nor would that company survive.
The collective understanding is irrelevant. It is similar to everyone thinking the earth is flat 500 years ago (and millions of people now too weirdly).
Honestly, I think you're trying to oversimplify...
There's lots of reasons why the workplace is the actual issue:
There's also lots of reasons why it can be really hard to jump ship:
Sure profit-maximization is known... but within that algorithm there are endless variations of how to achieve that goal, and some variations have a good work-life balance and some don't.
I'm not sure if it's helpful to tell workers that if they feel overworked they can just leave... it is honestly genuinely a full-time job to look for work sometimes. I think the better approach is to train companies to look after their most important resource in a sustainable way.
There is so much that companies can, and should, do to prevent the burn out of their employees:
Managing workload and expectations, providing clear career progression opportunities, providing support, reducing bureaucratic hurdles, etc... and then there is a bunch of other lifestyle supportive things they can do; provide childcare centers, provide educational opportunities, provide physical & mental health services, arrange deals in housing, provide transportation, etc. Of course companies are not obliged to provide these things, but there is a reason why lots of companies have, and that's because it all helps entice employees to join and retains employees by reducing burnout.
I think that this is where it gets interesting, because the oversimplification I see is in the heuristic of blaming the workplace. The complication comes in when people are changing all of the time.
I have a pretty unique view of this where I changed (mentally, physically, emotionally) in an instant. The job didn't change, I did - and it became magnitudes harder. While I still liked my job and what I did, I had to work for the money with far less certainty, worry about my family, my own health - blah blah. The workplace became for more stressful.
What people don't factor in is how they change over time, because it is like the proverbial frog in slowly boiling water. The changes not only change us physically, but also our opinions and beliefs about our experience. And this affects how we feel about our experiences, our workplaces, our relationships, ourselves and all the other aspects.
These days, very few workplaces in the western world are overly abusive, because they just won't be able to operate. However, people are increasingly demanding about what they expect from the workplace, as if the workplace should provide a full life experience. The irony is that the more the workplace provides, the more people rely on it and at some point, I can see it turning into a Brave New World kind of dystopia, where everyone is completely reliant on the workplace for all aspects of their life..
I disagree with that totally.
I think your overall view is that people are weak, stupid and selfish - younger generations especially - and this informs your views and opinions on so much that you write about.
People definitely don't want their workplace to be a full life experience. The provision of government services don't turn people into useless blobs.
People just want to live. They want to spend time with their family and friends, have quality relationships and connections, and spend their time doing worthwhile things.
Unfortunately, we've still got a society where the minority takes an outsized share of resources, and so the rest of us have to work harder and longer than we really need to.
People don't want their workplace to be a full life experience, I don't know anyone who thinks that. People just want to earn money to survive and look after their family.
Since people are working more hours per year than historic averages, we're facing burnout at higher levels. We need more education and research on it to help people realize, but it's also up to companies to manage burnout in their employees too - if they want to reduce staff turnover.
OH!
I just figured out why you keep pushing this idea that burnout is the fault of the individual and companies bear no responsibility whatsoever..... you want high turnover so companies have to increase training costs and employ you to do it.
Very clever. Carry on.
I have always tried to retrospect my life as you said and improvised like you but at times, I feel it creates some sort of anxiety, and needs strong determination to move forward. In contrast, I see almost ninety percent of people around me don't do that and they still live a happy life - so I believe it finally depends on our acceptance. Acceptance of how much we can do and be happy with that probably fits for all..
But listen closely to what they say, and watch how they behave, are they happy?
As you kind of said, I think people tend to think of work life balance as more of a black and white thing when really there is a lot of grey in the middle. It's a spectrum that many find themselves on either end of. I try to stay in the middle. I have zero problem doing a little more work at home after leaving work for the day, but I don't let it interrupt other areas of my life.
Sometimes more work is required, sometimes less. I think if most people were entrepreneurs, they would realise that being an employee isn't so bad.
I really agree to this. Life isn’t split into neat sections. Everything we do affects everything else. Trying to keep work and personal life completely separate just doesn’t reflect how life actually works.
But people don't worry about how things actually work, it is all about how they feel things work, or should work.
You're right, you're very right 🤔
A person may often be unaware of their potential. A small criticism or motivation can change their life. A small incident you experienced could have led to even bigger things. There are dozens of people in this life who say, "I owe everything to a sentence from that person."
Small things add up for sure. It is how the universe is built. But, everyone is looking for grand schemes and designs to get their faster.
Seems every aspect of our experiences affects the others, and being aware of this can assist us in living life more genuinely.
There is no escaping parts of life, they are all part of us.
Socrates said it well. Without self-analysis, we float through life, often not noticing what is important. Recently, I decided to go with my son to a museum in a neighboring city. We traveled 60 km in 40 minutes in a comfortable carriage with coffee and air conditioning. I told him that our ancestors traveled in carts between these cities under the hot sun for a long time. It is nice to realize the comfort of the modern world compared to other times.
Just think - all those great thinkers from the past and with many still relevant today, were able to discover so much within a few hundred kilometres of where they were born, or less. Now, people travel the world, have the history of the world at their fingertips - and are morons.
I never really liked those new-age-platitudes. They're so un-reflected, so empty. I think the work-life-balance was invented for those who are in conflict with their job, or who do not enjoy their work. I'm more on your side on that, work is part of life. I do think that everything has to have a balance, though over a long period of time.
There was a time when I had to work a lot and had no time with family. Now I have a lot of time with family and work, but not so much for social encounters. I see it rather as phases of priorities, necessary ones.
I think the intention is maybe that. To get those who overly do one side, in this case working, to take a step back and take care of the rest of their self. And, as always, it got twisted enough to be an excuse for everything.
Anyway, here's the link to the article I wrote yesterday regarding a detail of education. Another one is in the works.
https://peakd.com/hive-126152/@beelzael/pay-them-with-attention
"You need a change in your life" so they get a divorce. Even though their partner isn't the issue. Rather than working out what is causing their suffering internally, they look for an external scapegoat.
And a person can be supremely happy, working their ass off, if it is for the right reasons. So is the workplace the issue, or the person choosing to work at something they care little about?
I don't think everyone can choose their work, at least here that's not really the case. But there's the ego-part, too, many people believe themselves to be made for something better (which sometimes they are, but mostly not). My grandpa always said that one can have fun in whatever, if you really put effort in it. That didn't work for me, at least. But as I said, I believe that it's phases. Sometimes we have to bite the sour apple and work ourselves out of it, until we're in a position for a better job (through qualification, studies, whatever).
100 KG is 220 LBS that is a lot of weight to bench press. These days I bench press 150 LBS maybe could do 185 LBS as a max for 4 reps. During my younger days when I worked out with my co-worker who was an ex-wrestler and a wrestling coach in high school I could bench 200 LBS as my max with his spot. He was 20 to 40 lbs lighter than me but could bench press 240 pounds. I think that is because what muscles you train from childhood those are stronger and shorter arms create less leverage against you in bench press.
I maxed out at 23 years of age at 145 kg (320 lb) for reps unspotted. Can't get close to that now though :D
I think the shorter arms for me was part of it for sure. Half gorilla. I don't think bench press is a very good judge of strength, or at least, not quality strength. I am more interested in overall body function, especially since my body has been failing since I was 16. It would be nice to wake up painless sometimes.
I like to throw out this point for this is a deep reflection and I love how it captures how our need to define and categorize reality helps us function, yet also distorts it over time. Life always throws at us the very effort we brings in the world.
But sometimes balanced is not enough towards redemption.