Just a thought, but I think the notion of work/life balance is open to debate. Why have we become so taken with this notion? For many people, work is an important part of life for all sorts of reasons. I started working in the eighties. As far as I can recall the concept of work/life balance did not exist. I left school and undertook tertiary education believing I would work eventually. I was pretty realistic about what this meant. Work equalled money and, if you chose right, some sense of enjoyment, fulfilment and perhaps even vocation, was to be had in the workplace. If you didn’t like what you had chosen, you anticipated changing.
The idea of work/life balance wasn’t relevant. If you felt this, then quite possibly, you were in the wrong occupation.
For me, the eighties was a heady time. 80-hour weeks were common but the rewards opened up possibilities that our parents could only have dreamed of. Yes, towards the end of the decade I worried about burning out or imploding like the financial markets, but I was hooked. I loved the pace, the excitement, and the ‘fly by the seat of your pants and let tomorrow take care of itself’ mentality. I went offshore in the early nineties and continued to embrace new challenges, still working 60-70 hour weeks and rarely thinking about balance. I loved what I was doing. I haven’t ever got to a point where I felt work was somehow encroaching on what I valued about life or for that matter, leisure.
Now you may suggest I ‘live to work’ rather than ‘working to live’ but take a moment to think about work/life balance. Is ‘work’ really in such conflict with ‘life’ that there is a need to balance one off against the other? Perhaps this phrase is a just subversive little mantra that simply fuels stress as we seek (perhaps hopelessly) to balance work with life? Should we not be encouraged to accept and hopefully, enjoy work as part of life?
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