Work/life balance should be difficult
medium.com
Work/life balance should be difficult
1–10 of 192 posts
Re: Work/life balance should be difficult
#2Thank you. That gives a chance to think from another perspective about all that grinding.
Re: Work/life balance should be difficult
#3The headline makes article feels incomplete. We are told why the life side of the equation is important without any real mention of the value of work. It feels like the conclusion I am supposed to come to is that the balance is easy as work should always defer to life. Why shouldn't I put in the minimum amount of effort into work that gets me to a comfortable lifestyle outside of work?
Re: Work/life balance should be difficult
#4> Withdrawing from either side is pure lose.
Disagree. Withdrawing from family is a pure loss. Who cares about work. Maslow is a red herring here. You hunt for food for your family, you build shelter for your family, it all goes back to your local community.
"Work" in the Silicon Valley (and more generally corporatist) sense, has nothing to do with community, with making a better life, or with family, just pure productivity for the bottom line. I would argue that that's not even really work.
Re: Work/life balance should be difficult
#5The sum total of your life at any period of time should be fulfilling and each part of your life should be rewarding.
If you don't have that, then you probably need to be doing something else.
Re: Work/life balance should be difficult
#6The headline makes article feels incomplete. We are told why the life side of the equation is important without any real mention of the value of work. It feels like the conclusion I am supposed to come to is that the balance is easy as work should always defer to life. Why shouldn't I put in the minimum amount of effort into work that gets me to a comfortable lifestyle outside of work?
Maybe you should! Sometimes that's still a lot of work though. And sometimes for some people, the lines between life and work are pretty blurry.
Re: Work/life balance should be difficult
#7This article is also operating under the assumption that all "work" is equally fulfilling on every level of Maslow's heirarchy.
But much of what we work on nowadays has very little attachment to the actual physical sphere of connections, people, objects, community, etc that we interact with daily. [1] This makes a large portion of modern work simply not worth doing, because of how little it fulfills our needs.
It goes without saying that if you're able to work as a caretaker or nurse or volunteer with people in need (and also magically maintain the life side of the balance) that you will be very fulfilled by your work. But I don't buy that this is true for very many jobs in tech.
Re: Work/life balance should be difficult
#8> Withdrawing from either side is pure lose. Disagree. Withdrawing from family is a pure loss. Who cares about work. Maslow is a red herring here. You hunt for food for your family , you build shelter for your family , it all goes back to your local community. "Work" in the Silicon Valley (and more generally corporatist) sense, has nothing to do with community, with making a better life, or with family, just pure pro…
It’s not even pure productivity, much of it is just wasted time.
Imagine if all of the workaholic middle managers in the world couldn’t work sixty hour weeks and had to go home and shut off their work phones after 35 hours… just think of all of the meetings and reporting that wouldn’t have to happen if they were forced to use their limited time wisely.
Re: Work/life balance should be difficult
#9The headline makes article feels incomplete. We are told why the life side of the equation is important without any real mention of the value of work. It feels like the conclusion I am supposed to come to is that the balance is easy as work should always defer to life. Why shouldn't I put in the minimum amount of effort into work that gets me to a comfortable lifestyle outside of work?
"Why shouldn't I put in the minimum amount of effort into work that gets me to a comfortable lifestyle outside of work?"
I agree. Why shouldn't you? I've never heard anyone say "I wish I'd put more time and effort into work". I -have- heard "I wish I was paid more", and if effort equates to that (from all observations of my career, I remain unconvinced) I can see that changing your minimum (i.e., from "minimum required to not get fired" to "minimum required to get to the next level"), but going above and beyond that minimum doesn't extrinsically affect you. So if intrinsically you value 'life' more than 'work' there...better to take that time/effort and put it into life.
This article just made it clear how ephemeral work meaning is, and how important life meaning is, and how important it is to subjugate the former to the latter. Which I agree, seems at odds with the title.
Re: Work/life balance should be difficult
#10> Withdrawing from either side is pure lose. Disagree. Withdrawing from family is a pure loss. Who cares about work. Maslow is a red herring here. You hunt for food for your family , you build shelter for your family , it all goes back to your local community. "Work" in the Silicon Valley (and more generally corporatist) sense, has nothing to do with community, with making a better life, or with family, just pure pro…
Aren't you contradicting yourself? Work has to do with family/community if you use your salary to support your family/community.
Anyway, I think a significant majority of people would have no idea what to do with their lives if you took away their jobs and provided them with food/shelter/entertainment. For better or worse, our jobs are a huge part of how we conceptualize ourselves.