The Lie of Work/Life Balance
“I wish I’d spent more time at work” said nobody, ever, as they lay on their deathbed. Yet across the globe, women and men give their best hours, days, weeks, months, and years to paid employment for reasons that are not wholly tied to survival.
It’s a cultural diktat as much as an economic imperative, and one made inviolable by the peddling of a myth known as the work/life balance. This curious phrase has induced a collective brainwashing so effective that few of us question its veracity. These three little words imply that work is on a par with the richness and satisfaction of our very existence and must be afforded parity. But it is not. Whatever the financial drivers, work is a sub-set of life.
““[Gilbreth] a genius in the art of living.””
Work/life balance was originally suggested as a concept by Californian psychologist and industrial engineer, Lillian Moller Gilbreth. As a pioneer of time and motion studies in the 1920s, Lillian was one of the first people to recognise the importance of the psychological dimensions of work and used her perspectives as a wife and mother to inform her research. Moller questioned the entire ethos of the labour-in units-out paradigm of the industrial revolution. The interruption of the Second World War and the decades-long aftermath of economic re-building made Moller’s work seem like something of an irrelevance, but in the 1980s the issue resurfaced when women’s campaign for equality moved beyond parity in earnings.
Like capital punishment or the legalisation of drugs, work/life balance is a topic that comes and goes, but the collective reflection which has come in the wake of the pandemic has put it in the spotlight once more. We lost many of our freedoms in the past year and half but the enforced practice of working from home gave us a whole new perspective. We were suddenly freed from punishing commutes, expensive urban property and toxic work environments. Our lives, we realised, have been given over to avoidable stressors. We are waking up to the fact that we don’t actually have to live like this.
Gurnek Bains, cultural psychologist and founder of Global Future, recently published a report How Covid Changed Our Minds. More than a third of the 2,000 people surveyed said they had thought about changing jobs but 80% of people had done little or nothing about it, with two in five of those surveyed claiming that money concerns were preventing them making changes. Nevertheless, even if people aren’t yet in a position to change their work the report clearly points to a disenchantment with the status quo.
Off-trepreneurism, a term wittily coined by Whitecap Founder Steven Hess to describe this trend, is becoming a valid choice. It used to be we dreamed of leaving our jobs to try a different way of living ‘once the kids are older’, or ‘when we’ve got the mortgage down a bit,’ but increasingly people are deciding not to put off until tomorrow what they can do today. Falling rents in London and other major cities are the first reliable indicator that people don’t just want out, they’re actually getting out.
“I’m exhausted, but not especially stressed. This is something odd about my new life: even though it is far more tiring than my old one, it doesn’t stress me out in quite the same way”
Former Financial Times columnist, Lucy Kellaway recently published her memoir, How I Changed My Job, My Home, My Husband and My Hair (Ebury £16.99). In it she details her decision to leave her long-established and well-paid role on the FT for teaching in an inner London comprehensive. “I’m exhausted, but not especially stressed. This is something odd about my new life: even though it is far more tiring than my old one, it doesn’t stress me out in quite the same way.” Along with business partner Katie Waldegrave, Kellaway set up Now Teach, a non-profit designed to recruit teachers from the ranks of middle-aged professionals disenchanted with their chosen careers. It is amusing to read of the bankers and lawyers who secretly want to teach but some drop out “when they discover how hard it is to walk into a room where you’re not automatically the boss.” But many succeed, at a stage in life when it is assumed starting from scratch is impossible.
But is switching careers really just swapping seats on the Titanic? Surely the problem is not simply the relative merits of our jobs, but the status we accord them in our lives and the energy we are prepared to give them. If you’re over-worked and get stressed out as a merchant banker, chances are you’ll be an over-worked and stressed-out gardener unless you address the underlying motivations. Workaholics Anonymous is a 12-step fellowship designed to help men and women escape the pernicious cycle of workaholism that some pursue to the cost of their health and even their lives. Workaholism, a behaviour actively encouraged in Western societies, is classified as one of the ‘process addictions’ – some activity or behaviour that increases stress and forces the body to pump out cortisol and adrenaline, a not altogether pleasant sensation we nonetheless become hooked on. For some, work doesn’t just pay the rent, it fills the hole in the soul and we will do anything to keep feeding it even when we’re running on fumes and our relationships and outside interests collapse. Countless studies assert that people who prioritise their relationships are happier and live longer but how many of us can honestly say we put them first?
A lucky few enjoy work which is so fulfilling and purposeful that it justifies the hours it demands, but for the vast majority work is the predominant activity we unquestioningly prioritise ahead of our personal relationships, hobbies, and physical, mental, emotional and spiritual wellbeing even if we hate the job. Technology has exacerbated this; never offline, employers, colleagues and clients exploit our accessibility. Nobody wants to be seen as unwilling so we all collude in this subtle exploitation. Try telling somebody you work with – as I did recently – that you won’t schedule meetings after 4pm and won’t take calls after 5pm. It’s ok for me, I’m of an age where I don’t care what most people think, but the young are particularly vulnerable to what is effectively a form of coercion. We’ve all been grumbling about work days without end for a while but the pandemic provided people with a pause to really evaluate their lives and ask, “what the fuck am I doing?”
It's a very good question. And which of us honestly has the answer? From the age of five, in much of the Western world we are being prepared for work; our entire education system is predicated on a consumption driven economic model. Vocational education has surpassed scholarship and learning for the love of it disappeared a generation ago. I used to laugh at my ex-husband. He never had a science lesson in his life, and I thought immersion in Latin and Greek anomalous to a useful existence. But now, some thirty years after first we met, I consider him unusually lucky to have been the recipient of a classical education. His understanding of the world is both broad and deep. He has neither a mobile phone nor an email account and If he had to get a job today he’d be buggered, but I’ve met few more interesting conversationalists
Few of us can afford to abandon work entirely and if it gives us a sense of purpose and usefulness, why would we want to? But the priority we afford it in the landscape of our lives leaves us vulnerable to the professional setbacks which will inevitably come. Jobs come and jobs go, there is boom and bust, companies shut down, whole professions become redundant. If we give work our all then what are we left with when it is taken away? Thousands of years ago the Buddhists identified the impermanent nature of everything and the difficulties which come with attachment – to anything.
“Working all the time leads to what we refer to as a state of ‘knowing’ which is not good for us and leads to calcification of the personality”
In the Christian monastic tradition, people who work too hard are viewed with suspicion. I spoke to Br. Gabriel (not his real name) at a Benedictine monastery tucked away in rural Berkshire and he explained, ‘Working all the time leads to what we refer to as a state of ‘knowing’ which is not good for us and leads to calcification of the personality. We become fixed in our views and difficult to live with. Instead we are encouraged, through interests and hobbies, to be in a state of ‘seeking’. This is a tacit acknowledgement that we don’t have all the answers and it keeps us humble. In our tradition, it is considered important to develop one’s interests.’ Which is a very polite way of saying that working all the time makes you closed-minded, boring and arrogant.
With more and more demanded of workers it has never been more vital that it is we who make the big decisions about how we want the arc of our lives to go. If we are to avoid being habitually in reactive mode, responding to every latest development in technology and business, we must become the CEO of our own lives by making tough decisions and plan accordingly. But from responsibility comes freedom. By catching the current wave of disruption workers are being afforded a unique opportunity to plot a different course. We might have to take a financial hit but during the last year and a half we realised that we don’t need half the stuff we lazily consume, and a little less consumption would be good for the planet anyway.
If we’re actually happy, living lives we purposely choose and doing those things which bring us fulfilment and joy, our need for ‘stuff’ diminishes. We have discovered that we can live without two foreign holidays a year, that cooking and sometimes even growing, delicious food is more satisfying than eating out and that buying things you don’t need with money you don’t have to impress people you don’t like is a waste of time and effort. If we can get our heads round a different way of living, a more sustaining and rewarding existence, then maybe, just maybe, as CEO of our own life we will render the falsehood of work/life balance redundant.
Steven identifies three themes to consider:-
1/ Sketch a picture of how you usually spend your time each week. How much sleep do you get or time do you spend exercising, socialising, working, eating, enjoying hobbies, managing admin or shopping? Try to capture everything you do so that you can draw a complete and detailed picture.
2/ Does this marry up with what you want? Does your sketch allow for all the things that feed your soul, support you physically, emotionally, socially, psychologically? Remember that your life is a rich amalgamation of many things, character, beliefs, relationships and work. No one aspect defines you nor should define you. It is everything that you do that creates a balanced life.
3/ Now try to work out what you would like to doing with your time in the future. Consider how you would like to be spending your time in…three month’s time, consider next year, consider three years ahead and maybe just maybe in 10 years time! For each timeframe work out what you might need to change in order to get there. Start from today.