Working Toward Life Balance

An interesting twist on the work/life balance meme caught my eye:

Mitch Joel, The Myth Of Work Life Balance

Don’t do it. There is no such thing as work/life balance. By even saying there is such balance, you’re making an internal agreement that work is not a part of a healthy life, and I just don’t buy it. Like you, I put a good chunk of my waking hours against the work I do. I can’t accept that it doesn’t constitute an important and real part of my life. In the end, I’m not looking for work/life balance… I’m looking for life balance.

I have said for years that I’ve given up on finding a balance in life, I’m going for depth instead. But it’s not really the case. It’s just that I am looking for something larger.

I have said for years that I’ve given up on finding a balance in life, I’m going for depth instead. But it’s not really the case. It’s just that I am looking for something larger.

I agree with the spirit of Joel’s post, in which he deftly turns the work/life balance on its ear. But his rejoiner is all wrong for me.

He’s right when he says we need balance in our lives, including whatever it is we are doing as ‘work’. But his three categories — personal, business, and community — simply create a slightly more complex balancing act, and don’t go far enough. It’s too small.

Instead, consider the contour of a well-ordered humanism laid out by Claude Levi-Strauss:

A well-ordered humanism does not begin with itself, but puts things back in their place. It puts the world before life, life before man, and the respect of others before love of self.

So, for me, balance can’t be self-centered, it must be world-centered. 

We can’t find balance while the world is so out of balance. And any balance must come from putting the world and its living creatures before mankind, and then others before ourselves. Yes, those others include community and family, but can’t limited to only those that are closest to us. We must put all others before oursleves.

I don’t mean that we need to hand over all our worldly possessions to the first homeless person on the street. But we need to put the collective interests of the world ahead of our own ease and comfort. That means trying to correct injustice, diminish our carbon footprint, work to strengthen social ties, and so on.

We are obliged to accept the curtailing of our personal freedoms — the right to pollute, to waste, to look away — for the sake of helping to balance our collective relationship to each other and the world.

In the sphere of our relationships with others it is not enough to be available, or to make time for others: we have to respect others’ needs, and to work to gain their respect, in return.

It’s the high holidays, New Years is around the corner, and the self-help marketing machinery is going full-bore. Millions of people will buy exercise equipment and health club memberships, hire firms to clean up their closets, get liposuction, and acquire shiny cross country ski equipment: all chasing the dream of self-perfection.

All of that is the lesser path.

It’s fine in a way, but if those acts pull us away from the primary obligations we have to the Earth and its inhabitants, then it is just narcissistic play. 

So the real myth of work/life balance is the subtext that Joel has accepted implicitly: that balance — happiness and fulfillment — can be achieved if we restrict our attention to our immediate circle of friends and local community. It’s wrong, and untrue. We can start there — where we live and who we live with — but we have to be aware of the larger circle we are connected to.

If there is something universal we can learn from our experience in social networks, it is that we are only a few connections away from everyone in the surprisingly small world we live on.

We must commit ourselves to a well-ordered humanism, and if we are ever to find balance, it must mean a balance for all.