Against “Work-Life Balance” and In Favor of Something Better
The way we look at a our personal and professional lives takes a toll on both. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Since the time I began working a grown-up job, I have been hearing things about “work-life balance”. From what I can gather, this is supposed to mean something like a tolerable, or even desirable, division of time and energy among one’s professional and personal endeavors. If you have a good work-life balance, the conventional knowledge says, you are not sacrificing the health of one part of your life for the sake of the other. The two parts are effectively balanced.
While I respect the spirit of the phrase “work-life balance” and the sentiment associated with it, I disagree with its major premise. I don’t think balance is the right way to think about work and life because it assumes that we can (and should) strive to separate our work and our life. It assumes that we can each neatly separate ourselves into two people, and create two lives (or more!). And this type of thinking robs us of the opportunity to live a unified life — one where what we do for money and what we do with that money are in lock-step.
The “balance” model of managing the personal and professional is outdated, and needs to be…
