Why I don't talk about "work/life balance" anymore.
The buzz, my friend, has left the building...
I’m not sure when “work/life balance” became a thing. But I sure as heck wasn’t talking about it back in 2004 working 14 hour days shooting a TV show.
My jobs in the last decade though, have included lots of discussion about it. It became a bit of a buzzword. Something companies put on their website to show they weren’t awful to work for. Something employees used to describe not feeling burnt out.
And somewhere along the way, it kind of lost its meaning. It got hijacked by people who didn’t follow through. It meant something different to everyone.
For me, life and work are on a spectrum. There have been times in my life where I happily worked 14 hours a day. For the love of the what I was doing. I had passion and energy and youth on my side. And there have been times when I worked 32 hours a week and felt like my brain was turning to mush, exhausted, depleted and dying slowly inside.
I no longer have youth on my side. I’m not over the hill yet but years of sitting at a desk have given me aches and injuries that have impacted my daily life. I can no longer tolerate certain types of environment or situations. I crave the quiet. I need time to recharge and rebuild. The balance therefore is not really a balance at all. It’s a sliding scale that changes at different points in your life.
Work/life also implies that these two things are forever at odds. That we have two sides to our existence. And that work is half of that existence. Everything else just falls into “life”. But is work not life too?
Should we be talking more about having a satisfying life? Whatever that may be? Should work be more inclusive of “life”?
That was a rhetorical question. Yes, it should.
It just doesn’t make any sense to me anymore to talk about work/life balance. And I’m not sure anyone really understands what it means nowadays. You could probably ask 10 different people and get 10 different answers.
Since becoming self-employed, there’s a lot of terminology that I now recognise as company-centric. I’ve never needed to use much of the jargon I used when I worked for others. It just doesn’t exist in self employment because I don’t have to think about any other employees or negotiate on behalf of them or myself in the same way. So what I once thought was the norm was actually just a made up construct that helped to keep this divide of “work” and “life”.
There is only life. In all its many facets. Sometimes you’re up, sometimes you’re down. Sometimes you want to work on your career, sometimes you want to work on your family or your health or travel. The scale moves. It is never truly, equally balanced.
So perhaps instead of striving for “work/life balance”, we should be striving for the most fulfilling life possible.
What do you think?
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