Work/life balance doesn’t make sense. How can the two be separated? Work can’t be ‘making a living’ because we’re already alive. The “make” part already happened. Work is what you do with your life. Work is life, and life is work.
It’s easy to dismiss this as ‘obvious,’ but we treat these things as tangibly separate. We put on specific costumes and criticize those who don’t. We innovate our particular methods of communication to enhance our common understanding, create synergy, and break down silos. There are separate social norms and rituals. All so we can afford to live “life” in the margins.
The System
In “life,” it’s essential to define our values and live by them. That’s what makes us ‘who we are.’ We find them through our parents, our friends, our communities, and at church. We’re even taught about specific societal values in our early schooling.
- We’re all born equal
- We share
- We help one another
- We treat others like we want to be treated
- We are leaders, not followers
- We respect and enjoy “nature”
Most of us go through 12–20 years of schooling to prepare ourselves for the knowledge and experience of the working environment. We learn how to:
- Compete against our friends
- Value ourselves based on our excess
- Take our work home with us
- Only have fun during the allotted breaks
- Push paper to earn points
- Do whatever the boss asks of us
- Sit inside for long periods
We condition the “child” into an “adult”, replacing the natural with the unnatural. We turn humans into workers, washing the brains of naive notions of innocence and cooperation. We tell them this is just the way it is — as if we have no say.
If anyone dares reject this new reality, we cast them aside. We call them dropouts. We call them lazy. We say they have no work ethic. We blame the parents. ‘They’ are now “other”.
The Reality
In “life,” humans need access to whole, natural foods. Our ability to access those naturally occurring foods is determined by “businesses” (humans) and their willingness to produce and sell them.
In “business,” the food producers (humans) benefit by increasing profits by:
- Reducing human labor and wages
- Investing in automation
- Increasing prices
- Finding cheaper, unnatural alternatives (processed foods)
- Convincing people this is ‘healthier’ (marketing and lobbying)
In “life,” the consumer/worker (human) needs to do something to “earn” access to natural food. There are fewer and fewer jobs in producing natural foods at wages where you can afford to access them. Instead, the worker human might need to be willing to go into massive debt to learn to code, get a job building Farmville, to justify having enough money to afford healthy food. There’s no longer a place for humans to work towards producing what they need. That’s already owned by another human.
In “business,” Farmville (humans) must grow to be as big as possible. To do that, they need to:
- Reducing human labor and wages
- Investing in automation
- Increasing prices
- Finding cheaper, unnatural alternatives (AI)
- Convincing people this is ‘better’ (marketing and lobbying)
In “business,” the worker gets laid off because a ‘venture capital’ or ‘private equity’ firm has invested in Farmville and needs to juice it for all its worth. We do this at scale. It becomes hard to find a job in tech to pay off the student loans we took just to afford the natural foods that enable us to survive in decent health. It’s our fault for getting the loans in the first place.
In “life”, we cast these people aside. We say they aren’t willing to work hard enough. If we can do it, you can too! We call them homeless. We don’t want to have to look at them. We can’t have them in our communities. We don’t care where they go. They just can’t be here.
The Outcome
This cycle repeats until, in The U.S.:
- The top 1% holds approximately 31% of the nation’s wealth
- The top 10% collectively owns around 67% of the total wealth
- The majority, 90%, share 33% of the nation’s wealth
- The bottom 50% of the population owns only 2.5% of the wealth
We’re so busy blaming each other for how we got here that we refuse to see that we can decide to change all of it at any moment. We act like economic forces are outside our control while pretending we can control nature. (Of course, we’re separate from that, too)
We look to politicians (humans) to help make changes so that these systems still allow enough room for life. Politicians are elected based on their popularity. Advertising campaigns are expensive. These funds are donated by those who profit the most from the systems staying the same. We pretend we don’t know this.
Politicians turn the spotlight onto issues that don’t address the actual issues but redirect focus on the symptoms. Each side hates the other.
Why hate the player when you can change the game?
The Path
Why don’t we work together to take our collective life back? Shouldn’t our work support living a good life, not be some mandatory prerequisite to continue to justify existence?
We can forge better relationships with those around us, put more effort into bettering our communities, spend more time with our families and friends, and spend more time at leisure. We can live our lives more naturally.
We don’t need one person, or even just a few, to tell us what to do or how to get there. We can get back in the business of enjoying our lives. We can decide together what that means and change the systems to suit our ideal life. We say we love tradition. Let’s go back to the basics.
How do we start? By making sure our human systems uphold the core values of We, the people:
- We’re all born equal
- We share
- We help one another
- We treat others like we want to be treated
- We are leaders, not followers
- We respect and enjoy “nature”
