Don’t Fall Into the Trap of Work-Life Balance
This thing is now so widespread that just about everyone has not only heard of it, but they’re convinced they must strive to attain it. If you’ve been living under a pile of mindfully stacked rocks and haven’t heard of this, then you probably aren’t even concerned about having to balance your work-life and your personal-life. But then, there’s the rest of us.
If you go to Google and type in, “how to achieve work-life balance”, it will happily return for you well over A BILLION results. Thank you, no. I’ve already seen enough. You probably have too. And while this article is just adding to the billion results, I’m writing it in the hope that someone that’s burnt out on the whole thing might actually find it useful and relatable.
I’m not saying that there isn’t a real issue these days with people spending more time on work than on pleasure or just regular life (just wait until I get around to writing something about “side hustles”), but my natural contrarian starts to come out any time something reaches “fad diet” proportions and I’ve been wanting to write about this for some time now.
There are two reasons why this concept and the way it’s now presented, is a myth.
#1
The first reason is the way people view work itself. You have the folks who basically look at work as this negative, total bummer thing. It’s a “grind”, it’s a “paycheck”, etc. These people typically hate their jobs, for many different reasons. Then there’s the group who feels you must “love” your work and that if you do, you never truly work a day in your life. Also part of this later group is who I now call the, “passion people”. These viewpoints often lead to more feelings of imbalance and I’ll cover these in a second…
#2
The second, and even more important reason, is that much like a magical unicorn, it flat out doesn’t exist. There is no “life hack” or formula for it because the reality is everything you do is actually just your life. I hate to be the burster of bubbles here, but if you’re bound and determined to find that “perfect” work-life balance, you’re on a fool’s errand. Life changes. Work things and personal things change. To put it bluntly, shit happens. You stick to a particular formula and sooner or later, you’re going to run into trouble.
Stop demonizing certain work.
“You can control two things: your work ethic and your attitude about anything.” —Ali Krieger
I’m sure the idea that work is “bad” or that certain work is “low” or “menial” has existed for a long time, but perhaps because of the internet, it seems very widespread these days. I remember in 2005 watching the show, “Dirty Jobs” where host, Mike Rowe, would visit with folks who were doing jobs that were basically looked down on by many. He’d do the job with the person and get to know them a little bit. One thing that always struck me about the show was how much these people really valued their jobs and the work they did. They might have been digging muck out of pipes, but their attitude about it was almost always something positive. Their work ethic was outstanding.
The reality is, no matter what you do, your job has meaning. Your job may help others indirectly or by just providing great customer service, you may make another person’s day better.
Many of us have had jobs that we learned to hate. Once you truly hate something, it’s hard to put the brakes on that and see anything positive or rewarding in it. You’re literally blinded by those negative emotions you have about the actual job, the work you do, the environment, the people, etc. Maybe you’re just really not cut out to do the job (which is not something you should feel bad about, it happens). Needless to say, your balance is thrown off by this. It seems no amount of time away from the dreaded work is enough.
These are the times when jobs really do suck. In these cases, the best course of action is usually to find something else. Not saying that’s easy, but it could certainly help you to see work as a positive thing again. If you can do that, it’s much easier to feel “balanced” in the rest of your life.
On the flipside, stop feeling like work has to be your “passion”.
“A man in a passion rides a horse that runs away with him.”— Thomas Fuller
Passion is such an overdone word these days. I theorize it’s probably because of people like Tony Robbins. Either way, there’s no denying how in-your-face this buzzword is these days.
What this has done for some people though, is make it so that if you happen to not have a passion for every aspect of your work, you can feel bad or guilty about it. You circle right back to the point I just made about work being demonized. And what’s the opposite of passion? Well that would be things like apathy, disinterest, and even hatred. So there you go. You find you’re not madly in love with what you’re currently doing and instead of seeing any good in it, you loathe it and it starts to drag you right down, even if it isn’t an actually crappy job situation. Meanwhile, the memes keep hitting you …
Bleh. Here’s the real deal — you can still get something out of just about any work you do without having to be passionate about it. And what happens when your passions don’t actually align with the work you can do? Sometimes, the reality is you can’t have both, but you can always have hobbies.
One last thing I’ll say about passion is that it can sometimes mutate into obsession. Here’s an interesting 2 part article how to be passionate without become addicted.
Use Common Sense
“Never get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life.” — Dolly Parton
Dolly would probably make a better “life coach” than half the self-proclaimed life coaches out there. Getting so wrapped up in your work that you spend the majority of time on that, isn’t exactly healthy (remember the point above about passion leading to obsession?) — especially if people (or even pets) whom you share your life with are getting shafted by you spending all of your free time on that work thing (and yes, this includes “side hustles”). This is a difficult pill for some entrepreneurs to swallow.
Afterall, entrepreneurs are a key target audience for crap like this …
and this …
I can tell you from personal experience that “hustling”, like it’s promoted these days, can only be sustained for a limited time before your health starts to suffer. Funny enough, this has actually fed the whole work-life balance thing. Seriously, if something is returning over a billion results in Google, it’s big. Gurus, entrepreneurs, and hustlers everywhere are trying to cash in on this. There are books, there are seminars, and there are countless formulas.
We have all these people who are giving us their 2 cents about how they managed to achieve perfect work life balance by passionately getting up at 5 a.m., doing yoga, practicing mindfulness, unloading all their “work” onto some other poor schmuck, and following a strict Paleo diet. Bully for them, but everyone with their own formula can’t be your guide. They might give you an idea of something to try, but there is no magical program, percentage, or equation that, if you could just achieve it, you would achieve this mystical nirvana of work-life balance.
The best advice really is to stop worrying about it and “make a life”.
It’s Flexible
If you’d like a more modern point of reference, just look to professional organizer and sparker of joy, Marie Kondo, who states in Medium’s, The Health Diaries feature, “Work-life balance is a flexible concept to me. There’s no need to adhere to a strict standard.”
I’m not even going to go into what I personally do for “balance” because what I do has no bearing on what you should do. It also changes and evolves. There are a few constants, but I’m the type of person who needs different every now and then. Trying to follow a specific “plan” or thinking there is a “perfect” work-life balance truly is a trap.
