Ask HN: Alternatives to work/life balance?

Of course management will try to sell you your job as "higher aspiration" or a "sacred" goal (drink the startup kool-aid!). Means you'll work harder and longer and bargain less. They will also happily fire you, lay you off or cut your wages when times are bad. And then your lower aspirations (food, shelter) will suffer too.

Which is not to say you shouldn't enjoy your job, or aim to do fulfilling meaningful work. But doing one thing to exclusion of all others is not healthy. It's not productive, either - work/life balance will make you more productive: https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/11/10/work-life-balance-so...

I think you're thinking with the framework of contemporary corporations and 'employment' structures. I think many of us need to look outside of that box.

I've found there are organizations that are actually working toward higher aspirations, I don't think this is always or even often a bait-and-switch tactic which is what your 'kool-aid' comment implies.

Where's the implication that 'work' is only one thing? My work is almost certainly TOO varied.

In other words, you have hobbies.

If you can start an organization with a fundamentally different power structure (and maybe cooperatives could fit the bill) that seems maybe possible. If you're working for a normal company, you're just deluding yourself. I quite like the people I work for... but it's still in part an economic relationship, they have investors, and we might run out of money. So there are circumstances where I will need to find a new job. So my current job better not be my religion however much I like its goals or my coworkers.

Just because the organization works towards something meaningful doesn't mean it should consume your life. You still become distorted as a human if you don't have time just for playing, and friends, and family. It's called workaholism, and it's not a good thing.

Oh, and you'd need a fundamentally different economic system where people don't need to work to get basics like shelter or food or social status. All for that, but until we get there you're describing a goal which only the independently wealthy can afford to think about.

> until we get there you're describing a goal which only the independently wealthy can afford to think about.

That sounds true.

It sounds like you're young and you know everything. The geezers harping on about "work-life-balance" and protesting all-nighters and weekend sessions don't have a clue.

Just because you're fresh and excited right now doesn't mean that you're not susceptible to burnout. It can and will creep up on you much faster than you think. If you don't believe me, you can try it! I realize this sounds a little mean. It's my opinion, and I sincerely hope it's wrong and I wish you the best.

I feel like you're referencing a work/rest balance, I'm not opposed to that. I'm religious about taking one day off a week. But work/rest alternation seems very different from work/life balance to me.

Work/death balance. How much and in which ways do you want to die of overwork and burn yourself out?

This book may be a relevant read: "Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work"

That's the second time this has come up in the last few days on HN. That must mean something.

So you're saying you want to make your work your life? How about "my work is my life," or "I'm married to my job?"

I don't buy the dichotomy between work and life, and maybe those ideas should be thrown out altogether. The whole notion of 'work' is flawed.

No it isn't, "work" is what I do because I have to and "life" is everything else.

I have no idea what sort of response you're looking for.

That's how you feel. Not everyone else does.

There's a pretty compelling quote from the first chapter of The Fifth Discipline:

"There is also another, in some ways deeper, movement toward learning organizations, part of the evolution of industrial society. Material affluence for the majority has gradually shifted people’s orientation toward work— from what Daniel Yankelovich called an “instrumental” view of work, where work was a means to an end, to a more “sacred” view, where people seek the “intrinsic” benefits of work. “Our grandfathers worked six days a week to earn what most of us now earn by Tuesday afternoon,” says Bill O’Brien, former CEO of Hanover Insurance. “The ferment in management will continue until we build organizations that are more consistent with man’s higher aspirations beyond food, shelter and belonging. Moreover, many who share these values are now in leadership positions. I find a growing number of organizational leaders who, while still a minority, feel they are part of a profound evolution in the nature of work as a social institution. “Why can’t we do good works at work?”"

Senge, Peter M. (2010-03-25). The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization (pp. 4-5). The Doubleday Religious Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

This doesn't really answer the main question that is being asked of you by a variety of people: What, in general terms, are you looking to define or accomplish when you're talking about an "Alternative to work/life balance?" Are you talking about altruism through the office, or is it more about time-spent between the work and the rest of life? What goal, are you looking to accomplish with this, or any, alternative?

The general premise of work-life balance is finding a level of deference between the thing that makes you money and the things you get to do with that money when not attempting the goal of making the money. This interest in a different motivating factor, "good works at work," while noble is NOT an alternative to work-life balance, but a supplement. Investment in your "higher calling" may be with your church group, volunteering, donations, etc; and some offices do community outreach as parts of their team processes, but I'm not seeing it as a direct alternative to work-life balance.

If YOU are wanting to motivate YOUR work through a higher purpose or need, then by all means go ahead. You're given the station to do so through the income that you are afforded through your work. But I'm very much NOT motivated to donate my time to some corporate goal of altruism, because a corporation doesn't do anything for free.

I don't define work as 'the thing that makes you money' or life as 'the things you get to do with that money when not attempting the goal of making the money'. Many people continue to work after they've made enough money to satisfy their needs and be comfortable hundreds of times over. (E.g. Elon Musk)

But it's not limited to those people: many people do lots of work that doesn't earn any money and lots of people earn money without doing any work.

Lots of people start another company after a successful exit, and I'd bet their motivation is not 'the goal of making money'.

I reject those definitions. This is the sort of thinking I believe no longer works. Or at least doesn't work for me. I'm inquiring about alternatives to this.

If you want to work for the sake of what you are doing and not the material gain, then it's your calling or passion.

Why not work that covers Maslow's entire stack by default? Material, psychological, and spiritual gain. No decoupling as a rule?

Because 99.9999...% of the population doesn't have that as an option. The cheeky expression "they wouldn't call it work if loads of people wanted to do it" comes to mind. As a general rule, if someone (a group, etc) is willing to pay you to do something it's not something that's going to provide "psychological" or "spiritual" gains.

I would reckon that most people have a different philosophy with life than the tired phrase of work-life balance; in fact, that's mainly an HR fluff phrase to cover the fact that many companies consider 50-50 as a proper 'balance.'

A company or corporation inherently isn't and can't be fully altruistic, by the very nature of how a company works; it's essentially a work trade, you give them your time and labor, they give you money - they're not in the business of existential self fulfillment. You use Elon Musk as an example, but I would hazard to guess that while he may find existential fulfillment through what he does, it's not his top priority for his employees. I would venture to guess that his top goal for his employees is to have them continue to contribute to the goal of sending a rocket into space, make better batteries, etc.

Existential Fulfillment is your own responsibility and no one else's, if you want to find a place that meets all of maslows needs - for you - then start a company that does that for you. But don't assume your altruism will also fulfill someone else's top spots on the maslow pyramid; because self-actualization can only come from self.

You start out with "the whole notion of 'work' is flawed." but then you admit that people have different opinions than you. So it's not "flawed" to some people.

Sure, that's expressive of my viewpoint which I guess is probably a minority viewpoint but I bet it will grow over the coming years.

Even work that you believe in and and would do for free can burn you out. The "work-life balance" idea comes from a fundamental reality that we are humans, with varied needs. We need play, we need rest, we need certain kinds of interactions with each other and with our environment in order to live happy, healthy lives. No matter what your work (or "not-work") is, it can't possibly encompass all of those things.

But that's a work-rest balance, no? Parents often need to 'take a break from the kids' and 'get out of the house' . . . that's a necessary balancing but not a work/life balance. I'm not opposed to balancing, I just think the necessity of alternation doesn't equate to 'work/life balance'. Does it?

I feel like you're splitting hairs. If it's just a matter of terminology, what is there for us to discuss? I know that sounds blunt but I don't intend it to be rude. I feel like you can call it a work/rest balance if you want, but then you're categorizing a great many things that fall outside of "work" as "rest", while I might lump those things in with "life".

Here's a relevant article that might be a good read for you:

https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/09/11/theodor-adorno-work...

Thanks for sharing!

Beautiful paragraph: "In a magnificent essay titled “Work and Pleasure,” Adorno dissects one of the most perilous such modern myths — the tyranny of work/life balance. Just a few years after his compatriot Josef Pieper — an obscure German philosopher of extraordinary prescience — argued for reclaiming the dignity of leisure amid a culture of workaholism, Adorno examines the psychosocial origin of the toxic work/life divide that fractures our inner wholeness."

Really, thank you. The language here is pretty spot on, I've been looking for this for a long time.

"But the notion that the two spheres must be kept apart in order not to contaminate each other with their separate priorities and aspirations — something Adorno terms a “bi-phasic pattern of life” — is one immensely limiting of our humanity:

While the advice may offer advantages in terms of economic rationalization, its intrinsic merits are of a dubious nature. Work completely severed from the element of playfulness becomes drab and monotonous, a tendency which is consummated by the complete quantification of industrial work. Pleasure when equally isolated from the “serious” content of life, becomes silly, meaningless and sheer “entertainment” and ultimately it is a mere means of reproducing one’s working capacity, whereas the real substance of any non-utilitarian activity lies in the way it faces and sublimates reality problems: res severa verum gaudium [true joy is a serious thing].

This, Adorno argues, is one of many maxims inherited from the earlier development of middle-class society, which no longer serve us or apply to the technological and sociological realities of our daily lives, yet ones to which we continue subscribing."

"I have always found the notion of compromising — particularly when it comes to this unfair tradeoff of work and life — to be a double-edged sword of meaning: on the one hand, a compromise implies reaching a happy medium between two conflicting needs; on the other, to compromise requires the trimming off of excess in one area in order to alleviate a deficit in the other, which invariably means compromising — in the sense of undermining — the area deemed excessive. And yet, as Anaïs Nin memorably remarked her passionate case for the importance of excess in creative work, such compromising hardly benefits us in the end."

"Good work like a good marriage needs a dedication to something larger than our own detailed, everyday needs; good work asks for promises to something intuited or imagined that is larger than our present understanding of it. We may not have an arranged ceremony at the altar to ritualize our dedication to work, but many of us can remember a specific moment when we realized we were made for a certain work, a certain career or a certain future: a moment when we held our hand in a fist and made unspoken vows to what we had just glimpsed."

Indoors vs outdoors; focusing vs relaxing; earning vs spending; customers vs family; profit vs nonprofit; etc.

I don't know how to actually answer your question.

First I can recommend an essay of _Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness_. Not because what he says is true because it is more a reflection or a philosophical enquiry than a demonstration of something so it cannot be true of false in itself. But because it might provide some questions to ask about the source of ideas behind the concept of how we do work.

Second: related to a new mental model. I think in order to have a new mental model there should be a problem (a crisis) with the existing one.

What is the existing model?

A possible speculation (in IT) based on common mainstream ideas:

- There is/was a general move from seeing jobs/work as means to live to "making a dent in the universe" or "changing the world"

- There is/was a supporting atmosphere of believing that work can happen anytime and anyplace - we have access to what we need to work from everywhere and every time we want to

- There is/was a general idea that everybody should love what they are doing and should want to do that all the time

- There is/was a large support for work from home, which (at least symbolistically) means that work and home are not antagonistic concepts

- There is/was (maybe not majority) support and focus on spreading concepts of: one should hang together with one's peers afterwork, one should go to hackathons in weekends, one should read more about technology during personal time, one should come early to the office or one should leave late ...

- Now the outsiders are seen as being the ones who are saying that after work they are not doing programming but something unrelated to IT

Based on the mainstream ideas above then one possible logical conclusion could be that: (in general) we are not moving toward a work/life balance but to work being the main activity of the day and life being a complement.

What I agree with is that we don't yet have a name or a good understanding of the current model works - what what it is (which is not work/life balance). And it might be that we don't have such understanding because we are in a transition period.

Historically I think we passed through multiple periods for the vast majority of people:

1. When there is not life after work (and no concept of happiness, well-being ...) - from the dawn of humankind until manufacturing era

2. A period when the focus was on the life after work. When people were working to have money to spend after work. In this case it did not matter what kind of work was. It matter how much time one spent there and how much money could bring it. I think it lasted up until 70s - 80s.

3. A period of high purpose - let's called it "enlightenment" - when people wanted to "make a dent in the universe", "want to change the world" and basically everybody was talking about passion, ideas, ....

4. Now - a period of unrest or anxiety about the future

In the end I think there is one subject we are not talking about and I think it might define how we explore the topic you are providing and that subject is a question to ask ourselves: What is a GOOD life? Where GOOD is a personal concept including morals/ethics, happiness/well-being, tranquility, being content with life, but in the same time a concept defined or imposed by society.

edit: formatting

> When there is not life after work (and no concept of happiness, well-being ...) - from the dawn of humankind until manufacturing era

Actually, people in primitive (pre-XX century) agriculture (at least in my country - Poland) had lots of free time - for example, during winter there just wasn't that much to do. I think they slept a lot and also crafted stuff (ex. clothes). Of course, in the busy season (ex. during harvest) they worked longer than 40 hours a week, but I think in general they might have had more free time than the modern worker. And certainly, they had more agency. Of course, I am only referring to people who were lucky enough to have enough land to sustain themselves (a big issue in overpopulated Europe before chemical fertilizers were developed).