Work life balance is impossible

Here is the key bit:

"When you hear “balance,” you immediately think of a dichotomy. For two things to be balanceable, they must be at odds with each other. Lowering one side of the scale must raise the other side.

When we describe work and life as things to be balanced, we are suggesting that work and life are at odds with each other. More time or energy allocated to work means less time and energy allocated to life.

This is obviously absurd, though. Work is just another part of life like family, community, food, fitness, creativity, travel, fun, spirituality, etc.

The question isn’t how do you balance work and life, but how do you create a healthy relationship among work and the various other important areas of life? "

This is completely pedantic - obviously work is literally a part of life, so the phrase means exactly what the author states in the last paragraph.

Not worth reading IMO.

Working for money is imperative in most people's lives. The failure to do so carries a heavy stick including poverty, homelessness, health issues, the list goes on.

Contrary to the article, balance is impossible first because our economy and low-paying jobs are designed to lock people in them, creating a cycle of living paycheck to paycheck and barely surviving financially.

Work might be an important part of a life where it's not a person's top priority due to finance survival reasons, but would naturally be structured differently. Only in this privileged state is "balance" or "alignment" possible. Even so, I suspect not every healthy person would choose to work, given the opportunity to not.

"Making friends at work or coworking with friends can help support relationships and fun." And one day, it just isn't fun. Who do turn to for support? Will your friends be there when you quit your job? And to the contrary: If your friend, family and co-workers are all the same, how will you cope at work when going through a divorce?

I'd say there's a meta-balance to be had here. If you over-integrate your "buckets", you're removing redundancy from your life.

Agree with earlier commenters. OP uses lots of words to suggest what's really a one-word tweak: "Work-life alignment" covers the key concepts in a way that "work-life balance" does not.

My best years have been ingeniously unbalanced -- with many months of sprinting to get a work project done, offset by a month of trekking in Nepal. That was a keeper.

Author makes three fatal assumptions. One is a category error of work and life, the second is what work-life balance means in practice, and the third is for whom work-life balance advice applies.

The category error raises its head in the line, "Work is just another part of life like family, community, food, fitness, creativity, travel, fun, spirituality, etc." The author seems to group together all activities one does under the same umbrella as if that makes them equal. We already know they aren't because we often point out the distinction the evergreen antimetabole, "Do you live to work or work to live?"

The point of pointing this distinction out is precisely to make one examine one's priorities. It's easy to make excuses at home for time spent at work, but typically much harder to make excuses[1] at work for time spent at home. Excuses is a poor way to phrase this, but it highlights exactly the problem of putting work and life on the same level. If you cringe at reading the phrase "excuses at work" it's because work and home have this difference. Rather, we usually say "setting time boundaries on work" because we see work as one thing and life as another.

Finally, we must acknowledge that this boundary setting and it's formulation comes easier to some and harder to others. When the author attempts to universalize his advice, ignoring context, it ceases to be useful. Setting work boundaries is crucial to folks for whom boundary setting is more difficult. But to omit this is the final nail in the coffin of the author's bad advice.

In my own experience, personal growth came from doing exactly the opposite of what the author suggests. If instead, I had blindly taken his advice, I'd risk losing everything I hold dear. That's why it's bad advice.

I suspect 4DWW - Four Day Work Week - would tremendously help in achieving a better work life balance. Having worked many weeks that way made a tremendous difference in my life and happiness.

I think this is an extremely privileged view. The problem is many people are forced to work 80+ hours a week OR risk losing their immigration status, access to healthcare, and many other things. They have literally zero time left for activities that are restorative to mental health. Having your work be something you "love" to do is an incredibly privileged position to have. A few people can do it. The vast majority of the population cannot. Even those that do it usually run into mental health issues at the point where their "loved" career gets entangled with customer and political issues, if they cannot emotionally extricate themselves from their careers.

And be careful before telling someone that they can just change their job. Changing jobs is easy if you're a citizen, the economy is in good shape, and you have a bit of a financial cushion to get you through a couple unemployed months. For a lot of others, it's hard.

The bottom line is TIME is a finite, zero-sum resource, and there's no way to change that. It has to be a balance in terms of time allocation at the least.

This is good stuff to think about, but I still do think the "balance" framework is a good one because it's a simple one. At the very least, if you can reach a state where you are able to budget work TIME and non-work TIME, many of the other things the article talks about will naturally fall into place without having to think too much.

Kinda click-baity and not a lot of substance, prob not worth the 5 min reading it. Article TLDR - work is part of life (duh) and you're just trying to integrate everything.

I buy this argument by pointing out the necessity of sleep for core brain functions. Good luck living or working well if you’re not sleeping well. And yet, how many of us have gone years without good sleep?

Of course work-life balance is possible. Many people achieve it. I have, and so have a lot of other people I know who work in a variety of industries.

In fact, the majority of Americans like their jobs, despite the relentless barrage of nonsense in the media about "quiet quitting" and a "great resignation" that never actually happened: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2016/10/06/3-how-a...

Work and life is a dichotomy for most people. Most people don't want to work. They do it because they have to. So everything else on the list is "life", and work is work. And we want to balance the two to make sure that we still have enough time for everything we want to do (life), and work.

Some people are lucky enough to love their job, so the balance is easy because work is part of life for them. But for most people they'd always rather to more "life" and less "work".

The lists of parts of life reminds me of the GTD areas of focus at Horizon 2.

Once you have a list of what your areas of focus are, you can then pick goals (horizon 3 and 4) based on your overall life principles (Horizon 5).

So the exercise then becomes maximizing achieving the goals of each area of focus, and where they conflict, subordinating a particular area of focus to another one based on your priorities, which are themselves driven by your overall life principles in Horizon 5.

Wow. > Time with your family is much more enjoyable if you incorporate fun, work, creativity, and fitness, instead of seeing it as taking away from those things. I hope OP reads this. "Work/life balance" is corporate speak for "my personal shit is none of your business". I don't have much of a life and a lot of what I do is work centered and that is all on purpose on my end. But the relationship between work and personal life is absolutley subtractive and adversarial. You can do what you want on your own time but not on work time. If I have a work goal I need to get done, I can easily spend all of my time and energy on it which means I can't do whatever I want personally. I know a lot of people that don't put in as much me because they have actual families. There was a work situation where I had to work 12+ on weekends and evenings straight for a few weeks, people I counted on and mentored were bailing out because they had family committments. And that is what balance is. We have 24 hours in a day, you can't have two things as your #1 priority at any given time of the day. I absolutely never ever want to invole anyone at work with anything in my personal life either and many agree with me on this. I did try to this b.s. before and things did not go well. Don't eat where you shit. My personal life is for me to do whatever I want. I don't need to work if I can't do what I want with my compensation from work. This is the critical difference between an employee and a servant. To phrase it differently: work/life balance is intentionally worded that way because it is a restriction on expectations by employeers from employees. My personal is not additive to anything work related because I never agreed to that and I am not being compensated for that.

> When Luntz consulted for the Bush administration, “global warming” was a growing concern that the White House didn’t want to deal with. So Luntz suggested shifting from calling it “global warming,” which sounds scary, to calling it “climate change,” which at the time at least sounded much less intimidating. It was apparently luck that it ended up being the more accurate term anyway.

For me- work life balance is already taking advantage of creative wording. If I discuss "work life balance" with my employer- I don't really want to talk about my personal life. Really, what I'm talking about is managing expectations, hours, or responsibility.

But, the optics of saying "work life balance" are much better than "reducing responsibility"

> So Luntz suggested shifting from calling it “global warming,” which sounds scary, to calling it “climate change,” which at the time at least sounded much less intimidating. It was apparently luck that it ended up being the more accurate term anyway.

This doesn’t check out, it was a more accurate term so it stuck due to no opposition to it. By then it was clear climate can change not just by warming as a result of man made activities. The movie “The day after tomorrow” came out on 2004 (so production started a bunch earlier) using a popular perception that things can freeze from good old CO2. (They do explain it in the movie, since this was during the transition of terms)

Yes, language defines how we think, and the choice of words is important. But I don’t think I’m stuck in a loop trying to find the ‘balance’ between work and life, because ‘there can never be balance’. If you work a 9-5 job just cut off any work after 5. Adapt to the environment, if everybody is slacking and you don’t win anything by working too hard, than don’t work too hard. I think you should strive to maximize the return on your time. Be it more money for less time, or more enjoyment, more satisfaction, you need to understand why you spend your time, and how to get the most out of it.

It's just better to quit your job every few years and take 6 months off. And then find a new job that pays more. I haven't done it yet but I've been thinking about it for years.

First of all thanks for the book recommendation which seems interesting. I think however that your conclusions are "a" way of looking at it, given certain circumstances, which I assume are yours. In many cases, work is indeed something to balance against: when employers have the same dichotomy in mind, you must balance against that, otherwise work will override your other activities. And some people don't have the luxury of changing jobs. It's not my position fortunately but I know many.

if you want work-life balance get promoted. assuming you work a techie office job.

my managers barely work, they often don't come in during mandatory hybrid days and when they do it's just for lunch then out by 3.

there are only 2 types of people in every company - implementers, the ones who actually makes things and reviewers/approvers - the management types that does jack shit but has plenty of opinions and demands on what you're doing.

This comes off as a little too targeted at comfy professionals who have money and career security and flexibility (shocking for HN, I know). For most people, working is at odds with all of those other components of life. It's not just one of many components. It's almost invariably the component we would remove from our lives if we had the opportunity.

one could make a cogent argument that the point of 'work life balance' and the cult of mindfulness mandates from HR was not to serve as a poultice for a wounded working class, but rather to distance and externalize the risk corporations faced from inherent, systematic abuses they commonly engage in with legal impunity and to gaslight those very same workers into internalizing their burnout and exhaustion as a function of something they were instead doing to themselves.

it was to keep you worried about yourself, so as not to say, collectivize any sort of action against the real culprit.

Obviously, the work you do will affect your personal life.

Does your work have a strict 09:00-17:00 schedule? What type of work? How much required comunication outside of work? Is your work dangerous or stressful for you?

There is a lot of variables to crunch before you can define what is your work-life balance.

Some people (like me) just don't want to work and have to figure out how to sustain themselves with the minimum work possible.

I've worked with people who will gladly pull all nighters to get that last ticket finished. Absolutely crazy.

Honestly would rather be homeless than work like that.

There can be no harmony between work and life for most people because capitalism isn't interested in your happiness. It only wants to turn piles of money into bigger piles of money. Invariably whatever you do to manage your relationship with work will come to the attention of a manager who will make it their job to disabuse you of the notion that the managerial relationship can go both ways. They manage you, you can only negotiate with them. And they will never consider themselves held to any bargain you strike with them other than one that can be held up in court.

Some workplaces are more or less forced to accommodate (a subset of) their employees. But this only lasts as long as economic conditions force them to. As soon as those conditions change, get ready for the new fleet of managers ready to pound all the pegs into these square holes, never you mind what shape you are.

Work is always, at best, a tenuous truce.

I mitigate the imbalance by minimalism.

For example I spend only about 20% of what I make (after taxes). It's not that difficult for IT guys and remote world we live in right now.

> If a parent says, “my family is my life,” you don’t typically look down on them or think they have some sort of unhealthy obsession they can’t break out of. Their children bring immense meaning to their life, and you respect them for it. But if someone says, “my work is my life,” we treat it differently. Why?

Saying "my ____ is my life" and meaning it, means living disproportionately for the benefit of that blank over your own benefit.

Living disproportionately for the benefit of your family is, depending on your role in your society, at worst expected and at best compassionate. "Their children" — or their spouse, or their parents, or whatever they define as a family — "bring immense meaning to their life"? No. They love their family. That family inherently brings nothing, not meaning nor value nor anything remotely resembling a return on investment, that each member of the family itself doesn't choose to bring to it.

Doing that as an employee of a for-profit company, which most workers are, is at best mockably foolish and at worst literally suicidal. Even when you're healthy and content, it's self-sabotage. You are giving most of yourself to an entity that, if you were instantly vaporized, would only do something that approximates caring about you if you had generated a significant amount of its revenue and could not be readily replaced. Since everyone can be replaced in a company, a company cannot care about you.

Working for yourself, for a cause other than profit, or for or with a group of people who genuinely care for each other, is different — hopefully, obviously so — but also rarer and not what people tend to mock when they mock an obsession with work. Obsession with a craft, or work toward a common good, or a creative venture is more often seen as virtuous, or at least an aspirational goal, than a personal failing.

When someone overworks themselves for a venture like that and falls apart, communities rally around them.

When someone overworks themselves caring for a family and falls apart, people raise funds and rally to support them.

But when someone overworks themselves for a massive company and falls apart, that's — whether or not fairly assessed — the obvious consequences of a personal decision to prioritize someone else's wealth-generation apparatus over your own life.

> We can get a clue for how it becomes a problem by thinking about when the Family focused person becomes concerning. If they have no hobbies, no friends, no creative outlet, or poor health, then we might be worried that they are overly focused on their family.

No, because a family is emphatically not an employer, no matter how much work it requires. A family is not a bucket into which one pours their labor in return for specific value.

A family is other people. A family is a group where almost every person in it is, on some level, capable of focusing on everyone else in it.

If a person puts that much effort into their family and few or no others in that family can or will help that person, then that person is being abused — if not by the family itself then by societal forces like a lack of fundamental security or caretaking support — both of which typically require those people to do what to survive in modern society? Extensive, and one might even mistaken it for obsessive, employee labor in exchange for currency.

> We can say the same for work.

In the majority of cases we literally can't, because most workers put their effort into a company's shared goal and intentionally receive less value than what they put into it. It's an exchange of labor for currency, and most of those exchanges are at a rate that benefits specific other people at the company more.

A company, and especially the people who derive the most financial benefit from the company, does not care if you are overwhelmed — arguably, it does not care if you live or die — beyond how much your state affects how much monetary value you can provide to it.

It's a fundamentally different exchange in every way. Oranges and apples have vastly more in common than familial caretaking and employee labor.

The closest thing one can even reach for as something common between a person overwhelmed by their family and a person overwhelmed by their employer, is that their societies have failed them both.

Article: boring. Image of Philippe Petit wire walking between the Twin Towers: amazing.