Maybe We All Need a Little Less Balance

I was lucky to love my job for the outcomes and not just the paychecks. Is there any central pooling of contract work around more important Open Source projects? Here in DC we have interns working for free or cheap on good causes they hope will lead somewhere. I would think many software devs not raising families would take lower steadier rate for work they can talk about and be proud of. Many governments are seeking stable OSS office automation infrastructure. Stability is the goal compared to pyrotechnics. Is that a solved problem yet?

Is it really true that in most cases people can find a day job that isn't a necessary evil? People usually work because they need money to live, and employers usually pay money because they want stuff done that is not interesting or enjoyable enough for anyone to do as a volunteer. Most jobs in developed countries are service jobs, and few of these are things people love to do, they're just things that need doing, and someone is willing to pay for them to be done: working restaurants, inserting IVs in hospitals, caring for elderly, picking up trash, cleaning offices, staffing call centers, answering email on behalf of the CEO, processing insurance claims, driving Ubers, etc.

So there is some amount of needing to do something you don't necessarily love for a job, but it's perfectly reasonable for you to also not want this to consume your life 24/7. I mean, if you can achieve the feat of the photo at the top of this article—getting paid to surf—that might be great, but that's not really the norm for jobs.

> People tend to look for more "balance" when they are unhappy with whatever their main focus is

I disagree with this. I'm simply unhappy working on any single thing for too much time, no matter how fun or interesting it is. It's having a few things going on simultaneously, and being able to switch between groups of people to interact with (where the null set is also one of those groups), that has always kept me happy.

Sometimes it's as simple as being tired of being around people, in general. Balance in this case means having some alone time. Sometimes it's just being frustrated and tired of computers and the internet, in general. Balance in this case means getting out and going on a weekend trip to a national park, away from internet access. Sometimes it's that you enjoy your work but you don't enjoy the way people at work treat you sometimes. It's not a dealbreaker or showstopper, but you need time with those few close friends that you feel comfortable around.

It's especially true when you work on a startup or anything else that necessarily involves not being your true self. I spend most of my working hours being what my teammates/investors/customers want me to be, not being myself. That doesn't mean I'm unhappy working on that focus, it's just mentally tiring and exhausting to deal with what's involved in turning that focus into a company.

I spend the rest of my time being my silly self and let my imagination run wild and invent freely without dealing with people, law, ownership, money, or any of that nonsense.

None of this means that I don't enjoy what my main focus is.

Hmm, health and family are what I thought was meant by work life balance.

What happens when the things you enjoy doing either aren't financially supportive, or you're not good enough at them to compete for work where they are financially supportive? Like drinking beer, playing video games, and jogging? None of those are particularly valuable, unless you're able to wrangle a beer reviewer job or get on a tournament team. Half of all people are below average.

'Balance' in this respect doesn't mean 'give equal energy to work and play'. That's what the article is wrong about. 'work-life balance' means 'don't let work take over your life', which many people do. If you can sustain yourself by doing your joy, then 'work-life balance' is a meaningless phrase for you, and isn't intended for your consumption.

Sleeping is great, especially in cold early weekend mornings, but I'd loathe to have it as my main focus. I'd like to "balance" it with other activities.

Might be true in cases. For me however I love bootstrapping transloadit so much, that if I don't force upon myself different activities, I'm doing it all-the-time. The burnout symptoms that ensued at some point were a true wakeupcall for me. Even when I was with family I'd be learning about new tech on my phone or plotting how to deploy it. Just so excited, thinking about the possibilities. But apparently excitement is a form of stress and you continuously be in such a state without your body protesting after long enough a time. So you see, you can also love what you so too much and you'll need to balance. I think balancing doesn't necessarily mean keeping things at 50/50. To me it means regular reflection to see if I need more of one side for my wellbeing. Now I try to plan e.g. running and more social activities, and I try to dedicate my entire brain to family/friends when I'm with them (vs phone distractions and scheming future tech/business ideas) to make sure there's more to me than work.

I like my job but it is not EVERYTHING I like to do. I work with adults with developmental disabilities, it's really awesome. I also manage employees/families/employers and do various relationship building at work. This can be pretty tiring, I'm not a very outgoing person but I can turn it on for what I need to do at work. After many years of this I'm now much better at it. But I like web development too, so I pick up little freelance gigs or work on civic hacking projects in my community. One day I might switch to development as the main thing, in which I would expect to do some volunteering and such with the people I serve now. I have always found that combining jobs and hobbies can produce great overall results for me, though I don't agree that every given day/week/month needs to be "balanced" in a certain ratio. I do what's in front of me, and if I am restless to do more of something or hang out with certain people, I go do it. No need to get everything from one source.

I did the same thing in my early 20s and came to regret it. Especially since I know now that if I'd found the right mentors and/or learned the right things, I could've made better decisions and gotten much more accomplished in less time. You live and you learn.

The identity thing you mentioned is big, too. We can turn ourselves into machines, but it robs us of our personalities. Like anything else, being good at being social requires practice. You get rusty. It also helps to have interesting things to talk about, and work talk gets boring fast. If that's all you have to talk about, you start to wonder what happened to the rest of you, and so does everyone else.

Japan seems to have given up the idea of happyness for indirect proxies like a good job etc.

US, has gone down a similar path, but has this crazy idea you should be happy and successful. France IMO is closer to the ideal that happyness should be the goal not a side effect.

No the US is just irrationally obsessed with happiness.

Why do you think Japan is less of a consumption based society? Not saying you are wrong, but would like to hear why. I have heard things like they buy new cars every five years and don't like "used" houses and instead opt to tear down and rebuild houses when they buy them, not to mention there fascination with new technology. So I have never thought of Japan as being less consumption based.

"Interesting how in US I always see articles talking about how to find happiness."

One of the things worth remembering sometimes is that technically, what you're seeing is the media culture of a country, not necessarily a country's culture, in articles like this. They are certainly not unrelated to each other, but they are not the same, either.

I've often thought, for instance, that part (not all, but part) of the reason so many of our journalists are down on capitalism is not just political belief, but the specific fact that they are in an industry being actively disrupted by it. Of course they're a bit dour about economic issues, they're not exactly looking ahead to great prospects. I expect there's an ongoing selection process where anybody who has any reasonable chance of getting out mostly already has, so a lot of who is left is precisely the ones who are trapped there.

Are Americans actually obsessed with seeking happiness all the time, or is just our happiness-starved writers? I mean, it's not a topic I hear come up in my casual conversations very often. I know self-help books sell, but there's also a bit of difference between buying one on a whim and scanning it, and obsessing over it.

Japan has the highest suicide rate in the world and many heavily discussed social issues related to happiness, including salarymen, hikikomori, decreased rate of marriage and childbearing....I think you might just not be tuned in there yet.

It is the same - maybe to a lesser extend - in Europe. People should really stop telling others how to be happy

It probably has more to do with individualism rather than consumption-driven economy. Eastern cultures put less emphasis on personal happiness.

>I'm tired of these articles that seek to define ways to be happy

I don't think it's seeking to define anything, just saying that people are sometimes happiest focusing on what they are in to. One reason you see these articles in the US is that people there have been pioneering the scientific study of happiness, or "positive psychology" as it's often put, which only really kicked off in 1998 or so as a proper science. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_psychology)

I'm kind of a fan, partly because I think it could lead to a better way of governing/society. Rather than shouting yay left wing vs yay right wing, you could try to maximise happiness which could become more an engineering project than a shouting thing.

> This article is way out of touch.

It is and it isn't. People have to write articles to make money. Most articles just say things to say them because the journalists/authors have to earn their pay checks.

> We know what we want, but we cannot have it because we are in a system that forces us to work.

"Let them eat cake"... Exactly. We all want shelter, food, necessity and money to survive.

> who is this guy to tell us what life should be like when he seems so out of touch.

He's just some guy who is trying to get you to click and read his articles so that he can make money.

Just like the evangelical preachers or the self-help gurus. They are all in the business of making money. Not providing insights or anything of real value.

Fitter, happier, more productive.

I think a lot of people are stressed or sad when they are just going 100% on something difficult. They are probably just looking out for you. When my friends get crazy busy for a long time on something I tell them to take little breaks and balance it out because I know they don't feel good.

For some people though, working all the time doesn't feel bad. That could be the case for you.

>I do know I've had better success in things with single minded focus

You might have had better success "in things", but did you also had better success in relationships, family and personal health?

Because that's part of the balance thing.

Exactly, you can have these extreme moments in your life and still be balanced. The behavior the author is advocating is reactionary.. overly negative, relax please!

Your hazy definition closely matches my definition of mindfulness. As I've aged, I've realized that trying to be happy is a struggle. So, instead, I try to be content - which, curiously, makes me happy. That takes being mindful, for me at least.

Could you please point to or paste here the Heinlein quote you're referring to?

I've tried to google-guess it but failed.

I disagree- when doing something in life you can tell very quickly how it makes you feel, but when investing in a company it can be difficult to see how the company will do.