Work-Life Balance | Live | Health | Happiness | Trust

Why Work-Life Balance Is a Myth.

Life has many facets and work is one of it. It’s wrong to separate work from life. Live at work and improve your health and happiness.

How would you describe your life, if you were to completely exclude your work-life from it? Is that even possible? I dare say: no.

When I think about a normal week of my life as an adult and parent, I cannot exclude work. In fact, through work, I’ve met and got to know many of the people I love and connect with. So how can that not be part of my life? I understand that “balance” does not mean to completely exclude one part and below I describe why I still think this concept is wrong, nonsense, and misleading above all.

Dare To Say No

Sure, work has limits. But so do all other parts of my life as well. I don’t work on weekends, because I need time for myself, my family, my children, and my friends. The same is true for my kids: I don’t give up my own life for my kids, because that would be teaching them the wrong thing: to give up oneself for others.

At times it is right to put yourself behind the needs of others. What happens though when you do that consistently is that you lose your own life and that is far worse for your family and children than to say “no” from time to time.

Additionally, children have to learn one thing from their parents which they do not learn at school: How to find their own path in life and to accept one-self, right now and as-is.

A Balance Between Work And Life Does Not Exist

If we talk about a balance, we implicitly see the two things as separate. This is exactly where this concept is wrong and misleading. Life does not exist without work and work without life, well you simply can’t live unless you are dead and lifeless work would be simply that of a machine.

It does not say balance your work in life, it suggests balancing work and life. If we see work as an activity instead of a paid job, then is housekeeping, taking care of your garden, or building things with your kids not work? So “work-life-balance” suggests that work is supposedly no meaningful or fruitful life — that is just something I cannot accept.

Let me explain in the next paragraphs why the concept of work-life balance is not only misleading, it also brings forth very weird concepts in our work environment that try to make us feel better, but in the end, they are a band-aid-solution and they won’t solve the underlying problem.

Work Is A Huge Part Of Our Life

If you work full time, your work is probably about 40% of your waking hours. Calculate it for yourself: Take the number of hours per week (168h), subtract ~9 sleeping hours per day (63h), and then calculate the percentage of the hours you spend working. Yes, I know that calculated on your lifetime it’s probably less, as you have many years where you grow up and then hopefully many years after you retire. The point though is, during the largest part of your adult life, where we workweek for the week: do we want to spend our time in a lifeless activity? An activity that brings us no joy? An activity that has no meaning for us and for our life? I don’t know about you, but I have decided that this is not an option for me (if I can avoid it).

I’m by no means ignoring that for many employees it might be the sad reality that their job does not fulfill them or has no meaning, yet seeing it as a dualistic trade-off is contrary to my values, to my beliefs.

Work Impacts Our Private Life And Vice-Versa

We all know it and we’ve all experienced it: when we had a bad night, a fight with our partner, financial troubles at home, problems with our kids at school or whatever keeps us occupied: we’re not as effective at work as we could be and probably want to be. This is normal.

The same is true the other way around: if you got negative feedback from your boss when the product isn’t advancing as it should, when your colleagues were mean to you or when we’ve experienced a massive setback: we take this home with us and it will impact our private life. There is nothing sane we can do about that. The negative sentiments will always spill over between both worlds, so even if we wanted to separate the two, we couldn’t.

Jobs That Promise Us Fun Activities

More and more companies add to their job offerings that they care about their people by mentioning “excellent work-life balance” and providing them with space to do fun stuff, team activities, or barbecue evenings. Don’t get me wrong: this is all great! Yet I have experienced that, depending on where you stand in your life, people don’t always want to spend more time in the working space, even if it’s with really awesome colleagues.

The balancing, as HR intends it, very often implies accepting dissatisfaction and being treated like a “number” at work, hoping to “counterbalance” it with leisure and family activities, which supposedly is life. But we’ve already shown that the negative sentiments don’t stay at work or at home — the two are interconnected and inseparable. I would rather not have leisure activities and team evenings when I get to be treated as an individual at work and live at work instead.

What We Really Want

We want to be happy at all times, right? No, I don’t think so.

Imagine your life as a line that goes up if you feel good and down if you don’t feel good. If life would be linearly flat, i.e. always being happy, it would be boring. The ups and downs in life are essential, they are required for us to see happiness in the good times, and sadness in the bad times. They are needed for us to aim towards happiness or away from sadness.

So we want to reduce the amount of “downtime” in our life, replacing it with fun activities and the like. Well, yes and no. Yes, because we do want to be happy most of the time. No, because “replacing it” is wrong in my opinion. It’s as if to coat over it, to override it, to cover it up. Just as with an illness, we don’t want a band-aid that makes us feel good, but does not treat the illness at its core, because if we don’t treat it, it will come back — again and again.

We can live a very long time by covering up the roots of sadness, of being unfulfilled and of feeling bad, insecure, or helpless. Yet, I dare say that we all want these things to be truly solved, not just pushed aside. Is this possible to achieve 100%? I don’t think so. Even if so, it is a lifelong process. That is in my opinion what makes us human.

Finding A Solution

We Want To Be

The solution to me is that we can be. Be who we are, be sad or happy, feel helpless, or be helpful, feel strong, or weak. As humans, we all have these parts in us, so it’s not about cutting out the parts we don’t want, it’s about accepting them and learning to live and to deal with them. One cannot exist without the other.

Coming back to the workplace: If we simply want to be, there is little to gain from leisure activities when the time at work does not allow us to be who we are when the workplace does not accept us as a human being. This is what I believe is wrong in the offerings of companies that sound really nice and draw a picture of a paradise: colleagues playing together laughing. It is possible, I know that. But it won’t make up for being treated like a machine, for not being heard or not being accepted as a human or even more: not being accepted for who you are. This will deprive you of your energy, of life in the long run.

It All Starts Within Ourself, In Our Mind

One could believe that we all want to be living a good life, a good life in the eudaimonic sense, pursuing our potential and our personal growth in every moment, in everything we do.

So the first thing we have to do is make a decision. We need to see work as part of our life. From there a lot of things look different. You may accept a job that pays less but allows you more to be yourself, to evolve, to grow. It may be accepting a job in a totally different area, to explore who you are and what you can do. Whatever it does or means, is yours individually.

You won’t find a perfect job. I never have either. Yet it is how we present ourselves (as humans with faults, integer and curious to learn?) and especially how we see work and how we react to it and how we act in this environment. What we can change is us, we can’t change others. It starts with ourselves, in our minds, and how we perceive the world around us. We can start with a good enough job and continuously work on ourselves to make it better.

In a different article, I explain how we shape the world we perceive:

I would say the ultimate goal is that we can be who we are at home and at work. The lucky ones among us know that feeling of “being at home” with their partner, where they can be who they are and don’t have to pretend to be someone else. Wouldn’t it be awesome to have that same feeling at work, with your colleagues and also with your boss?

We Need Trust To Get There

First and foremost, the environment to enable a healthy work environment is to build trust. A lot of us believe trust takes time to build and it can be destroyed in an instant. I’m not going into detail on how to build trust, yet for me, it is clear that being human, showing our own faults and errors, admitting that we can’t be good at everything is extremely helpful to build trust.

In order to support building trust with anyone, I also find it rewarding to show trust, to express trust. Be the first to trust. In simple ways, in everyday actions. Without trusting our colleagues and work environment, we’re not going to open up, to show who we really are. We would not be calling our boss and asking for a leave on short notice and honestly explaining our situation — we might call and make up some story, and then we might feel bad that we lied to our boss. I believe we don’t want to lie to our boss or colleagues, we want to be honest. Yet often enough life has taught us that we encounter rejection, disbelief or people stare at you and frown. It makes us feel uneasy and that is exactly what we need to allow for. If we want to build trust, we need to become more comfortable with feeling uneasy or uncomfortable. We need to challenge the status quo and ask questions or speak up.

We cannot force trust, we cannot make our boss and our colleagues trust us. We have to start with ourselves, to trust others and often it helps to speak it out loud: “you’ll be doing the right thing, I trust you”. Your trust will be rewarded or it will be misused. You’ll learn from it, to not trust everybody, to be careful and you will get better at choosing the people you trust, the environments you trust.

Edgar Schein writes in his book “Humble Inquiry” that leaders should be listening more and asking more questions. Asking questions builds trust. I think this is true for all of us. More listening and more asking questions to build relationships.

Conclusion

For me, it is clear that finding meaning in work is getting more and more important, in fact to me it is obligatory. Not because a brainless 9-to-5 job would not do the job of earning me the money I need to live, but because the time spent at work is so substantial and is so precious to me that I’m not willing to waste it.

The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else.

— Aristotle

Live-At-Work or Work-Life-Integration — that is how I would describe it. Or as a friend put it “Life-Domain-Balance”, because work is one of life’s domains.

I hope this article sparked some interesting thoughts because it all starts in our minds.

Thank you for your time!