An Impossible Model That's Still Worth Shooting For
An Impossible Model That's Still Worth Shooting For
Let's talk about the whole work/life balance, thing.
For some reason, it’s still strange to me to hear “work/life balance.” Saying this makes it sound like work and life take away from each other, yet they deserve equal time.
It sort of feeds into the narrative about retirement. You’re supposed to work, work, work, until you don’t have to work anymore. You take a few vacations to get away from the work, but you don’t really ever stop until retirement. And that’s when you get to do all the things you’ve been wanting to do.
I have this unpopular opinion that by developing more robots, we’ll be able to replace human labor for the most boring and tedious tasks. For some reason, people are very afraid of this. I personally see it as an opportunity to free up valuable human brains to do more important work—but I digress.
My point is that people are spending their lives doing unimportant work that they don’t like.
Let’s be clear, there is no job in the world where you will be doing exciting, useful, even fulfilling things all the time. Sometimes you need to sit in front of a spreadsheet for 12 hours. Even if you only love your job 20% of the time, that’s a full workday that you’re getting paid to do something you otherwise would just do on your own for free.
That’s not bad.
My point is that it’s unreasonable to withhold the fullness of the life you seek for the sake of purely menial and unimportant work. Your life is happening. You can’t wait until retirement to start. It’s already started. You’re living it.
I believe in work/life symbiosis. (Yes, that language is pretty cheesy, but I haven’t found a better way to describe it. Let me know if you have some better language for this.)
The idea is that one energizes and reinforces the other. Your work either develops a skill, motivates you, or provides fulfillment. Your life reciprocates.
If I told an investor I was going to put all of my money into one stock, that investor would tell me I’m stupid. It’s too risky and the investor would advise me to diversify my portfolio.
It’s the same for happiness, fulfillment, and usefulness. If you get all your happiness from your job and then COVID-19 sweeps across the plains and it’s gone, now what?
I’m not saying that perfectly synergistic work and life is possible and I’m definitely not saying that I have this mastered. I’m just saying that it’s worth striving for this model because it’s possible to get close.
The closer we get to work/life symbiosis, it seems that gratitude, happiness, and our helpfulness to others all get easier.
Thanks for reading.
This is not a totally complete thought or philosophy, so I’d love to hear what you’d add or take away from this post.