There is no work-life balance

I’ve long been chasing work-life balance, especially since I became a father more than 13 years ago. But the more I pursued that quest, the more tension I felt…

… only to realize that there is no work-life balance.

First of all, there is no “work” on one side and “life” on the other. Life is everything. Work is just a part of life.

If you separate the two, you create a tension with no name. You won’t know where it comes from. You’ll try harder to balance work and life, only making the tension worse.

Been there, done that.

So let’s escape this Chinese finger trap by naming these two parts:

“Professional life” and “personal life”.

(which are just labels to make my point, all your life is personal)

Looking at balancing these two has the same effect: creating a tension. If you feel the need to balance the two, that means one of them (hint: professional life) is seen as detrimental to the other. The other (personal life) automatically becomes more important.

You see the problem?

That’s structural imbalance by design. Trying to balance the scale will only make the tension worse again, because you’re not addressing the root cause.

I think we need to stop looking at work-life balance altogether, and instead look at two separate things:

How I balance my relationship with my work.
How I balance my relationship with all the rest.

Those are the only two things worth considering because that’s where the problem lies in the first place.