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Comment by alansammarone | Hacker News Reader

This is a very good point. People tend to look for more "balance" when they are unhappy with whatever their main focus is right now. The obvious example applies: people don't like their day jobs very much, and so they go around advocating more "work-life balance" to compensate for it, because they feel it is a necessary evil. It's not (at least in most cases).

If you're not happy with whatever your main focus is, you need to change it, not add more stuff to compensate.

(Of course, there are still some things that you should pay attention to apart from your main focus, like your health and family. This is not the point here).

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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.

I think it's more a matter of being lucky enough to enjoy doing something which is valuable to others. It's easy to love what you do if your hobby is in demand.

Sometimes even those are pretty shitty jobs, though. My hobby is art.

Commissions really suck sometimes, as they aren't creative and generally aren't enough to live on. Comic book artists often work long days only to be greeted with pain at the end of the day. Hand cramps are the least of the worries: such artists often develop problems with their dominant arm, commonly carpal tunnel and tennis elbow. And these are usually contract jobs with no benefits whatsoever.

My mother is an excellent seamstress. Most paid work is wedding alterations, tailoring clothing, and sewing patches on military uniforms (decent demand here for quality work, which she does). That work absolutely bores her and she winds up hating her hobby.

Of course, these aren't exactly in demand per se but is illustrative of how things change once you are working for it. It really isn't all that easy.

Agree 100%. As they say, if you only had to do it when you felt like it, they wouldn't call it 'work'.

Even if your hobby is in demand, that still doesn't mean you'll love doing it on somebody else's terms. Like, I enjoy developing software, but I've had projects that I didn't particularly enjoy and constraints that rendered seemingly-enjoyable projects miserable.

I think it's more a matter of being lucky enough to enjoy doing something which is valuable to others.

Another way of looking at this is: rather than basing your enjoyment of life on pursuing a pleasant hobby (which you may or may not be able to get paid for), instead derive your enjoyment from doing things that need to be done.

In our society that translates roughly to "earning a living by helping others". If this is your source of satisfaction, you don't need very much luck.

Totally agree. Very out of touch to say most people want to work full time. They do not.

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.

When I was first looking for a job out of college, I asked a couple of area technology companies if I could work for them for free. In both cases they told me that their corporate / legal policies wouldn't allow it.

Nowadays many tech companies are happy to take unpaid contributions to their software via pull requests. You could even do it as a full-time unpaid "job" if you wanted; pick a company that open-sourced their software and spend your time full-time improving it.

Not to mention unpaid internships...

Working for free isn't legal, unless it's an internship for which the intern received academic credit...(some other exceptions too).

Hopefully automation will reduce the need for humans to do the boring, repetitive jobs and increase the number of people working in jobs they find rewarding and interesting. I doubt we could eliminate the former completely and have everyone doing the latter, but it seems that automation may improve the ratio significantly.

I bet people said the same thing when Watt perfected the steam engine. I'm not buying it, workload will simply increase to compensate productivity improvements.

Ah, but if people said the same thing, people were right. The number of repetitive jobs (being a peasant, moving your hand up and down a loom) has indeed decreased.

Being a peasant (in the sense of someone working in the land, not as the subject to some feudal lord) was much more free and far less repetitive than being a factory worker (or an office drone for that matter).

People also don't understand how many free hours those people had (because a lot of farm work is seasonal).

Farmer in the winter sounds like an OK job as long as you had enough food stored away.

Depends on the place. The mediterranean winter (which I am aware of) in places like Spain, France, Italy, Greece, etc, was not that much of a deal.

> 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.

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.

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.

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 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?

> 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.

It sounds like they made a bargain[0] with "Phil, the Ruler of Heck and the Prince of Insufficient Light."

[0] https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/icon_uk/11800056/855574/8555...

Link to original: http://dilbert.com/strip/1996-06-02

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

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.

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