How many times have you told yourself that you need to find a better work-life balance? Well guess what? Work-life balance is a lie. I know sometimes you feel like a zombie at the end of a long day at the office. But unless you are actually undead at work, in which case you’re probably too busy lurching around biting people to be reading this, the concept of work-life balance is of no use to you.
Work-Life Balance Is a Lie
The idea of work-life balance is a lie because it creates an artificial separation between your job and your life. “Work-life balance” implies that your job is not a part of your life. How is it that we categorize 40+ hours a week as something other than life?
There are 168 hours in a week. Theoretically, we all spend 8 hours a day – 56 hours a week – sleeping. (Does anyone actually sleep 8 hours a day any more? I try, but usually fail.) This leaves 112 waking hours. If you work only 40 hours a week, and many of us work more than that, that is 35% of your waking time that you just counted as “not life.” A full third of your life that is something else. And according to the work-life balance principle, that’s not living. It’s work.
This concept we have that our jobs are not part of our life indicates a dangerous level of compartmentalization. Not only are we writing off a third of our life, but by separating our jobs from living, we end up with multiple standards for how we spend our time. If work isn’t life, it becomes okay to be miserable about our jobs. It’s just a job. The interactions we have with our coworkers take on different criteria – they’re just coworkers, after all. Keep it civil and get through the day. And we often let ourselves feel victimized in the context of our workplace. Even people who are good at taking control of other areas of their lives often feel like they have less control over their “work lives.” How many times have you felt like you just go to work and try to get through your day? Do you really want to be “just getting through” a third of your life?
Work Isn’t Your Job
A job and work are not the same thing. You may have to work at your job, or you may not. (Studies have shown that the average office worker does 1.5 hours of work in a day.) Even if you do work hard at your job, your job is not work.
Calculate Your Balance
I found a little work-life balance calculator that improves upon the two-part work/life division. It divides your time into six categories: work, sleep, leisure, meals, commute and chores. I am not saying that the calculator doesn’t have its uses. When I was living in Los Angeles, I didn’t realize the effect my commute was having on me until it started impacting my social life, energy levels, and my health. If I had entered it into the calculator, I would have seen that I was spending ten percent of my time commuting! When I moved to DC, my commute decreased to three percent of my time, and it made a difference. But even this more complex division ignores the complexities of life, especially with regard to leisure time.
For example, I just started riding horses again. Three days a week I go to the barn, feed horses, clean water buckets and do barn chores. Often, this is work – not as in job, but as in good, old fashioned, give you blisters, hard work. So how do we categorize it on the calculator? Is it work? I assume by “work, they mean job, so we’ll say no. The barn is a half hour away, so that is certainly commuting time, but does it count if it’s not a commute to a job? Plugged into the calculator, that is four to five percent of my week driving back and forth from the barn – it seems like it should count for something. And what about chores? It looks like chores, it feels like chores, but I’m paying for the privilege to do them. The one thing it would seem to count as is leisure. But for leisure, it sure is a long commute and an awful lot of hard work! (Also, where is exercise on this calculator? That must count as leisure too.)
How about gardeners, especially vegetable gardeners. Gardening can be very hard work, physically. If you grow your own food, it will offset your grocery bill, saving you money that theoretically would come from a job. Also, it is meal-related – time spent shopping for and preparing them. Is gardening a chore or a leisure activity? If you belong to a co-op or sell at a farmers’ market, is it a job?
Life Is Work
The reason it is not easy to make these distinctions is that the separation doesn’t actually exist. Work-life balance is a myth. Last time I checked, most things in life take work – hard work. Going to the office, growing your own food, caring for your kids, keeping up your home, being a good neighbor – all of this is work. And all of this is life. “Don’t live to work, work to live.” We do both, because life is work. And long before we offices, humans went about the work of living, there was just less paper and fewer middlemen to make it seem like work and life are separate things.
It’s okay that living is work. But it’s not okay that we’ve been trained to think of work as a separate thing, to be balanced with our real lives, whatever that means. This separation prevents us from finding true balance, a “life balance,” if you will, with all its subtle intersections.
In order to live balanced, integrated lives, we must change how we think about life. The hours we spend at our jobs is just as much a part of our lives as the time spent not at our jobs. And it’s okay that the hours spent not at our jobs often seem like work. By separating work and life, we discourage ourselves from making the choices that allow us to pursue balance – a full life balance, all 100% of it.
