This is a very good point. People tend to look for more "balance" when they are unhappy with whatever their main focus is right now. The obvious example applies: people don't like their day jobs very much, and so they go around advocating more "work-life balance" to compensate for it, because they feel it is a necessary evil. It's not (at least in most cases).
If you're not happy with whatever your main focus is, you need to change it, not add more stuff to compensate.
(Of course, there are still some things that you should pay attention to apart from your main focus, like your health and family. This is not the point here).
Is it really true that in most cases people can find a day job that isn't a necessary evil? People usually work because they need money to live, and employers usually pay money because they want stuff done that is not interesting or enjoyable enough for anyone to do as a volunteer. Most jobs in developed countries are service jobs, and few of these are things people love to do, they're just things that need doing, and someone is willing to pay for them to be done: working restaurants, inserting IVs in hospitals, caring for elderly, picking up trash, cleaning offices, staffing call centers, answering email on behalf of the CEO, processing insurance claims, driving Ubers, etc.
So there is some amount of needing to do something you don't necessarily love for a job, but it's perfectly reasonable for you to also not want this to consume your life 24/7. I mean, if you can achieve the feat of the photo at the top of this article—getting paid to surf—that might be great, but that's not really the norm for jobs.
I think it's more a matter of being lucky enough to enjoy doing something which is valuable to others. It's easy to love what you do if your hobby is in demand.
Sometimes even those are pretty shitty jobs, though. My hobby is art.
Commissions really suck sometimes, as they aren't creative and generally aren't enough to live on. Comic book artists often work long days only to be greeted with pain at the end of the day. Hand cramps are the least of the worries: such artists often develop problems with their dominant arm, commonly carpal tunnel and tennis elbow. And these are usually contract jobs with no benefits whatsoever.
My mother is an excellent seamstress. Most paid work is wedding alterations, tailoring clothing, and sewing patches on military uniforms (decent demand here for quality work, which she does). That work absolutely bores her and she winds up hating her hobby.
Of course, these aren't exactly in demand per se but is illustrative of how things change once you are working for it. It really isn't all that easy.
Even if your hobby is in demand, that still doesn't mean you'll love doing it on somebody else's terms. Like, I enjoy developing software, but I've had projects that I didn't particularly enjoy and constraints that rendered seemingly-enjoyable projects miserable.
I think it's more a matter of being lucky enough to enjoy doing something which is valuable to others.
Another way of looking at this is: rather than basing your enjoyment of life on pursuing a pleasant hobby (which you may or may not be able to get paid for), instead derive your
enjoyment from doing things that need to be done.
In our society that translates roughly to "earning a living by helping others". If this is your source of satisfaction, you don't need very much luck.
People usually work because they need money to live, and employers usually pay money because they want stuff done that is not interesting or enjoyable enough for anyone to do as a volunteer.
When I was first looking for a job out of college, I asked a couple of area technology companies if I could work for them for free. In both cases they told me that their corporate / legal policies wouldn't allow it.
Nowadays many tech companies are happy to take unpaid contributions to their software via pull requests. You could even do it as a full-time unpaid "job" if you wanted; pick a company that open-sourced their software and spend your time full-time improving it.
Hopefully automation will reduce the need for humans to do the boring, repetitive jobs and increase the number of people working in jobs they find rewarding and interesting. I doubt we could eliminate the former completely and have everyone doing the latter, but it seems that automation may improve the ratio significantly.
I bet people said the same thing when Watt perfected the steam engine. I'm not buying it, workload will simply increase to compensate productivity improvements.
Ah, but if people said the same thing, people were right. The number of repetitive jobs (being a peasant, moving your hand up and down a loom) has indeed decreased.
Being a peasant (in the sense of someone working in the land, not as the subject to some feudal lord) was much more free and far less repetitive than being a factory worker (or an office drone for that matter).
People also don't understand how many free hours those people had (because a lot of farm work is seasonal).
> People tend to look for more "balance" when they are unhappy with whatever their main focus is
I disagree with this. I'm simply unhappy working on any single thing for too much time, no matter how fun or interesting it is. It's having a few things going on simultaneously, and being able to switch between groups of people to interact with (where the null set is also one of those groups), that has always kept me happy.
Sometimes it's as simple as being tired of being around people, in general. Balance in this case means having some alone time. Sometimes it's just being frustrated and tired of computers and the internet, in general. Balance in this case means getting out and going on a weekend trip to a national park, away from internet access. Sometimes it's that you enjoy your work but you don't enjoy the way people at work treat you sometimes. It's not a dealbreaker or showstopper, but you need time with those few close friends that you feel comfortable around.
It's especially true when you work on a startup or anything else that necessarily involves not being your true self. I spend most of my working hours being what my teammates/investors/customers want me to be, not being myself. That doesn't mean I'm unhappy working on that focus, it's just mentally tiring and exhausting to deal with what's involved in turning that focus into a company.
I spend the rest of my time being my silly self and let my imagination run wild and invent freely without dealing with people, law, ownership, money, or any of that nonsense.
None of this means that I don't enjoy what my main focus is.
What happens when the things you enjoy doing either aren't financially supportive, or you're not good enough at them to compete for work where they are financially supportive? Like drinking beer, playing video games, and jogging? None of those are particularly valuable, unless you're able to wrangle a beer reviewer job or get on a tournament team. Half of all people are below average.
'Balance' in this respect doesn't mean 'give equal energy to work and play'. That's what the article is wrong about. 'work-life balance' means 'don't let work take over your life', which many people do. If you can sustain yourself by doing your joy, then 'work-life balance' is a meaningless phrase for you, and isn't intended for your consumption.
I like my job but it is not EVERYTHING I like to do. I work with adults with developmental disabilities, it's really awesome. I also manage employees/families/employers and do various relationship building at work. This can be pretty tiring, I'm not a very outgoing person but I can turn it on for what I need to do at work. After many years of this I'm now much better at it. But I like web development too, so I pick up little freelance gigs or work on civic hacking projects in my community. One day I might switch to development as the main thing, in which I would expect to do some volunteering and such with the people I serve now. I have always found that combining jobs and hobbies can produce great overall results for me, though I don't agree that every given day/week/month needs to be "balanced" in a certain ratio. I do what's in front of me, and if I am restless to do more of something or hang out with certain people, I go do it. No need to get everything from one source.
Might be true in cases. For me however I love bootstrapping transloadit so much, that if I don't force upon myself different activities, I'm doing it all-the-time. The burnout symptoms that ensued at some point were a true wakeupcall for me. Even when I was with family I'd be learning about new tech on my phone or plotting how to deploy it. Just so excited, thinking about the possibilities. But apparently excitement is a form of stress and you continuously be in such a state without your body protesting after long enough a time. So you see, you can also love what you so too much and you'll need to balance. I think balancing doesn't necessarily mean keeping things at 50/50. To me it means regular reflection to see if I need more of one side for my wellbeing. Now I try to plan e.g. running and more social activities, and I try to dedicate my entire brain to family/friends when I'm with them (vs phone distractions and scheming future tech/business ideas) to make sure there's more to me than work.
I was lucky to love my job for the outcomes and not just the paychecks. Is there any central pooling of contract work around more important Open Source projects? Here in DC we have interns working for free or cheap on good causes they hope will lead somewhere. I would think many software devs not raising families would take lower steadier rate for work they can talk about and be proud of. Many governments are seeking stable OSS office automation infrastructure. Stability is the goal compared to pyrotechnics. Is that a solved problem yet?
> Here in DC we have interns working for free or cheap on good causes they hope will lead somewhere. I would think many software devs not raising families would take lower steadier rate for work they can talk about and be proud of.
It sounds like they made a bargain[0] with "Phil, the Ruler of Heck and the Prince of Insufficient Light."
Sleeping is great, especially in cold early weekend mornings, but I'd loathe to have it as my main focus. I'd like to "balance" it with other activities.
I can relate to what is being discussed in this article. For the last 2 years I've been focusing solely on my startup at the expense of my relationships with family and friends. So far, it's been working alright because we're still quite young and I don't feel like I'm missing out on any significant things in their lives. But now I'm at the point where I don't need to sink 16 hours 7 days a week and I'm really struggling with reevaluating my identity which has been so closely tied with just building shit constantly
I did the same thing in my early 20s and came to regret it. Especially since I know now that if I'd found the right mentors and/or learned the right things, I could've made better decisions and gotten much more accomplished in less time. You live and you learn.
The identity thing you mentioned is big, too. We can turn ourselves into machines, but it robs us of our personalities. Like anything else, being good at being social requires practice. You get rusty. It also helps to have interesting things to talk about, and work talk gets boring fast. If that's all you have to talk about, you start to wonder what happened to the rest of you, and so does everyone else.
Interesting how in US I always see articles talking about how to find happiness. Ever since I moved to Japan I haven't heard this theme yet. I am made to wonder if consumption based societies have a bigger issue with being unhappy than those that strive for conservative lives. One one hand the author has a point. I can think back to activities where I was happiest that involved being consumed wholly by that activity. On the other hand, there are moments where I think I'd be better off if I didn't focus so much on that one thing. I'm not sure where I'm going with this other than I'm tired of these articles that seek to define ways to be happy. This really says something about our society or perhaps about the nation. Is there a happiness crisis? I don't see it happening here in Japan but perhaps I'm disallusioned as I have not fully integrated into this society.
"Interesting how in US I always see articles talking about how to find happiness."
One of the things worth remembering sometimes is that technically, what you're seeing is the media culture of a country, not necessarily a country's culture, in articles like this. They are certainly not unrelated to each other, but they are not the same, either.
I've often thought, for instance, that part (not all, but part) of the reason so many of our journalists are down on capitalism is not just political belief, but the specific fact that they are in an industry being actively disrupted by it. Of course they're a bit dour about economic issues, they're not exactly looking ahead to great prospects. I expect there's an ongoing selection process where anybody who has any reasonable chance of getting out mostly already has, so a lot of who is left is precisely the ones who are trapped there.
Are Americans actually obsessed with seeking happiness all the time, or is just our happiness-starved writers? I mean, it's not a topic I hear come up in my casual conversations very often. I know self-help books sell, but there's also a bit of difference between buying one on a whim and scanning it, and obsessing over it.
Part if the problem is businesses wanted more tabloid journalism because they wanted to make money. The real journalists fought it but apparently lost, or gave up, or did something else. Now that all news is essentially tabloid, they're not distinct enough to not be aggregated.
I mean with Trump, it's even happening to the papers that have good journalism. They've all turned to Chicken Little and the sky is falling. I mean I can go anywhere to read about the part where Trump said something stupid. I want them to analyze everything he said.
The newspapers were one of the latter industries affected by globalization and disruption. Had they been one of the first, and complained when globalization and automation was in it's infancy, a lot of people wouldn't have embraced it so and the wealth gap would be a lot smaller. Who knows?
Rising income inequality means bleaker prospects for most. Things are pretty nice in high-tech because it pays well (probably too well for what we actually do).
>I mean, it's not a topic I hear come up in my casual conversations very often. I know self-help books sell, but there's also a bit of difference between buying one on a whim and scanning it, and obsessing over it.
Well, judging from sales volumes of self-help books, storage space in bookstores (when those were a thing), success of such shows, motivational speakers, the whole alternative lifestyle industries, and even all the sects and BS "religions" and evangelists to "change life", etc, yeah, the whole nation is "obsession over it", much more than any other place on earth.
Why do you think Japan is less of a consumption based society? Not saying you are wrong, but would like to hear why. I have heard things like they buy new cars every five years and don't like "used" houses and instead opt to tear down and rebuild houses when they buy them, not to mention there fascination with new technology. So I have never thought of Japan as being less consumption based.
I reckon it isn't. All I'm saying is that people or should I say media, are not obsessed with the subject. Perhaps life is more about fulfillment and less about how that makes you feel? Can anyone truly maintain happiness as a state of mind? Is that even possible?
Japan has the highest suicide rate in the world and many heavily discussed social issues related to happiness, including salarymen, hikikomori, decreased rate of marriage and childbearing....I think you might just not be tuned in there yet.
Japan seems to have given up the idea of happyness for indirect proxies like a good job etc.
US, has gone down a similar path, but has this crazy idea you should be happy and successful. France IMO is closer to the ideal that happyness should be the goal not a side effect.
>I'm tired of these articles that seek to define ways to be happy
I don't think it's seeking to define anything, just saying that people are sometimes happiest focusing on what they are in to. One reason you see these articles in the US is that people there have been pioneering the scientific study of happiness, or "positive psychology" as it's often put, which only really kicked off in 1998 or so as a proper science. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_psychology)
I'm kind of a fan, partly because I think it could lead to a better way of governing/society. Rather than shouting yay left wing vs yay right wing, you could try to maximise happiness which could become more an engineering project than a shouting thing.
Japanese culture is deeply anti-individualist and frowns on excessive displays of status.
It's interesting to compare the countries distribution of wealth. Japan has the lowest wealth Gini coefficient in the world (aka more equality) while the US is the 5th most unequal country:
> “the path to fulfillment in life, to emotional satisfaction, is to find what _you_ really excites you and channel your all into it.”
That reminds me - what happened with the proofreader strike again?
This article is way out of touch. We know what we want, but we cannot have it because we are in a system that forces us to work. And we cannot break out of that system because of land costs. We want to go cycling. To spend time with our kids. To sit on our ass if we so choose. To help others. To stroll. But we gotta pay the rent.
I guess this guy needs to spend a bit more time at the office away from his family to "achieve excellence" in basic proofreading. I wouldn't normally be so harsh but who is this guy to tell us what life should be like when he seems so out of touch.
It is and it isn't. People have to write articles to make money. Most articles just say things to say them because the journalists/authors have to earn their pay checks.
> We know what we want, but we cannot have it because we are in a system that forces us to work.
"Let them eat cake"... Exactly. We all want shelter, food, necessity and money to survive.
> who is this guy to tell us what life should be like when he seems so out of touch.
He's just some guy who is trying to get you to click and read his articles so that he can make money.
Just like the evangelical preachers or the self-help gurus. They are all in the business of making money. Not providing insights or anything of real value.
I try to live in Skill Sprints that direct focus for a few years. I pick things that combine history, books, places and tool mastery like photography, music training, cooking, core muscle exercises or even Buddhist Pali suttas and walking meditation. You have to create your series of time boxed challenges. With a daily drumbeat of global finance news and HN it keeps me out of trouble. Our notational computer process logic and memory access hierarchies turn out to describe almost everything worthwhile. [ed. Did not want to skip music training.]
I've wondered when people tell me to be more balanced if it is for my good or because people feel uncomfortable when someone is working very hard on something. I do know I've had better success in things with single minded focus, but when more balanced others find me more interesting. Perhaps I need to balance my periods of balance and being focused.
I think a lot of people are stressed or sad when they are just going 100% on something difficult. They are probably just looking out for you. When my friends get crazy busy for a long time on something I tell them to take little breaks and balance it out because I know they don't feel good.
For some people though, working all the time doesn't feel bad. That could be the case for you.
The thing that sucks about going 100% on something difficult isn't the thing being difficult, it's when you fail relentless for an extended period of time that makes you burn out.
I've taken a big step back from start up culture. I don't work more than I have to, I travel more, I meet interesting people. The funny part is now I feel more energized and connected with what people really need. Very little of it has to do with apps or algorithms.
My feeling when being in startup mode was essentially the sunk cost fallacy. I've already put this much work in, success must be around the corner. But I look at some of my peers with similar mentalities and you can't help but feel they're too focused on the day to day without realizing the product and demand is garbage. Life is short, enjoy it.
I think the idea is to be balanced across a larger time frame, not balanced at every moment. Sometimes, you might be more into one thing or another, but you have balance across a decade or some other time scale.
Exactly, you can have these extreme moments in your life and still be balanced. The behavior the author is advocating is reactionary.. overly negative, relax please!
This misses the dimension where specific people are your passion in life. For example your significant other and children. In those cases work IS a necessary evil and work life balance is a direct attempt at gaining more time for your passion.
I'm not in that boat and gladly lose myself in things, but I understand the perspective.
"Maybe the good life is not about trying to achieve some sort of illusory balance. Instead, maybe it’s about pursuing your interests fully, but with enough internal self-awareness to regularly evaluate what you’re not pursuing as a result — and make changes if necessary. Living in this manner..."
> Instead, maybe it’s about pursuing your interests fully, but with enough internal self-awareness to regularly evaluate what you’re not pursuing as a result — and make changes if necessary. Living in this manner trumps balance any day.
That is exactly how I would describe 'balance'. The article seems to use a different definition, though.
What author describes likely comes down to individual traits, especially hormone and enzyme status. E.g. if you produce high MAO-A due to genetics, then your dopamine and serotonin status will be chronically low. And this might lead to you being addicted to novelty, quick wins, and generally overly stimulating activities [1].
Gut or microbiome issues can also have unbalancing effects on neurotransmitters.
I don't mean to refute the article, it's just not for everyone; and maybe people already do what they gravitate towards anyway.
I love my friends and my happiest moments are stories of adventures we did together. Yet, I'm ultimately an introvert so after a weekend or week with people I desperately crave consecutive days of solitude.
I love my job, but it's tough and there is always more work to do than there is time for. When I'm on a project I like I throw all of myself into it, work too much, and burn myself out.
I'm constantly trying to find balance because my default approach is an "object in motion stays in motion".
Generally a good article but I think the author struggles too much with something that isn't that difficult. If you really enjoy something then won't you naturally pursue it? Of course, you love it. If you have multiple things you love you'll pursue multiple things, dividing your time between them. IF you hate something then the only reason you would give it time is because there's something you don't hate about it.
This isn't that difficult, its really just intuitive.
I think balance will mean different things to different people, so this question is going to be nearly impossible to answer. I also think people have different personalities and happiness gradients.
I'm going to use a hazy definition of balance here, meaning that you do not forget your friends, family, health, hygiene, ethics, beliefs, secondary hobbies, leisure.
> Nearly all of the great performers I’ve gotten to know — from athletes to artists to computer programmers to entrepreneurs — report a direct line between being happy, fulfilled and at their best and going all-in on something.
The vast majority of people are not great performers, so this seems like a poor sample to draw any conclusions from. Combined with survivorship bias, likely this is just finding that the people who are most positioned to reach what this society calls "greatness" tend to be those who are able to hyper-focus on one thing without it draining them. There are often fairly serious consequences to disregarding balance in one's life, but when it comes to the "great", those consequences are often forgotten, forgiven, or written off. But the "greatness" label is not absolute, it's assigned. We could have chosen to value something else. I think the fact that we dropped ethics in favor of "greatness" is a huge, costly mistake.
This is not the case for the other 99% of the population. Why does Western philosophy insist so much on this insane focus on the "great"? They're not most people. They're never going to be most people. And, frankly, they're not very important. Why do we want to compel the person to just zero-in on one thing? If you ask me, that sounds incredibly boring. Cue Heinlein's famous quote.
As for me, I can observe a distinct increase in day-to-day happiness when things are more balanced for me. When I have a solid schedule and routine, when I eat well, when I exercise regularly, when I keep my area clean, etc., I'm generally much more content with things. If I have to super focus on a given thing for a long time it usually wears me out and winds me up and not in a good way.
This doesn't mean that aspects of balance don't need to be sacrificed at times to get something done (after all, extra things require extra resources and sometimes your resources are limited). But I didn't really enjoy such times.
But I've never been a thrill seeker, I've never been a hyper-specialist, nor do I have a very obsessive personality over any given topic. This seems a very personal thing, but current society definitely has a preference for the hyper-specialized. I think that's a pity.
Your hazy definition closely matches my definition of mindfulness. As I've aged, I've realized that trying to be happy is a struggle. So, instead, I try to be content - which, curiously, makes me happy. That takes being mindful, for me at least.
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
An undiversified portfolio maximizes possible upside … and possible downside. If you have a rational level of risk aversion, that should persuade you to strive for balance and a more certain return.
The fact that in this case the portfolio is of "life elements" rather than "shares of companies" shouldn't change the conclusion.
I disagree- when doing something in life you can tell very quickly how it makes you feel, but when investing in a company it can be difficult to see how the company will do.
One way to look at it is that balance is fundamentally about stability, not neutrality. Maybe your fulcrum isn't at the center of all possible aspects of your life, and maybe that's not something that needs to be fixed.
Instead of a work-life balance, consider a state-of-flow/state-of-social balance. Spend chunks of time heads-down in solo project; and spend chunks of time between tech talk, elevator pitches, and tangential discussion. Instead of striving for an eudaimonistic balance between the two, let the balance freely oscillate between those extremes as feels natural for you.
So? We need more balance between a balanced life and an unbalanced one?
Seriously though, who is that guy talking to? Does anyone truly believe that having a perfectly balanced life makes one happy? Haven't they made thousands of movies about this?
Sorry for the negativity but "live a little" seems a bit of a shallow advice from the New York Times...
If you're not happy with whatever your main focus is, you need to change it, not add more stuff to compensate.
(Of course, there are still some things that you should pay attention to apart from your main focus, like your health and family. This is not the point here).