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Work/life balance should be difficult
21–30 of 192 posts
Re: Work/life balance should be difficult
#22> 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…
But say that we didn't have business or currency, and you had to go and get food for your family. Wouldn't you have to make sacrifices even then? There might be an emotional situation going on at home, but if the food supply was dwindling that is also an immediate problem.
If anything, businesses have allowed us to spend way more time with family than we would if we actually had to hunt / farm / gather for food. Our quality of life is so absurdly high exactly because of our economy. I think people forget what it would take to survive without society.
Re: Work/life balance should be difficult
#23Your work should revolve around your life, not your life around your work. There's always going to be another exciting project after this one. There's not going to be another exciting life after this one.
Re: Work/life balance should be difficult
#24> We need work.
Not sure I follow. It's amazing how these little bits of social knowledge ferment the flavor of the story. It's a lot like learning to taste beer or wine. Once you take the time to sit down and learn to pay attention to your senses, you can identify things like acetaldehyde, diacetyl, and mercaptans. It's fun teaching people how to sense things they weren't aware of before.
The author seems to have done a little trick. By assuming this little fact, it serves as a rationalization for Dad's emotional neglect. It explains his behavior in retrospect, and I get why that makes sense. But that doesn't mean it's true, it doesn't have any predictive power because it reverses subject and object. "We need work" is a social fact, nothing more, and it's only true as much as it's believed to be true. To me it stands out like pickle in pancake, maybe it can for you too.
Re: Work/life balance should be difficult
#25This is a stupid take. Work life balance could be easy if we didn't live in a system that forced you to sell your life to wealthy sociopaths in exchange for the right to exist.
Let's take away the modern economy - what would you have to do for survival?
Re: Work/life balance should be difficult
#26The 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.
This is spoken from a clear position of entitlement. Many lives do not have the benefit of being fulfilling or rewarding, and those same lives do not have a choice to "do something else."
Re: Work/life balance should be difficult
#27> We need work. Not sure I follow. It's amazing how these little bits of social knowledge ferment the flavor of the story. It's a lot like learning to taste beer or wine. Once you take the time to sit down and learn to pay attention to your senses, you can identify things like acetaldehyde, diacetyl, and mercaptans. It's fun teaching people how to sense things they weren't aware of before. The author seems to have do…
Work is generally a proxy for survival. Do you agree that you need to eat in order to survive?
Re: Work/life balance should be difficult
#28The problem is basically sow/harvest. If you're in the situation most people are in, you need to eat today, and you need to eat tomorrow. Quite a lot is done to force kids to invest early on in their lives: go to school, don't get pregnant, don't waste your future. However at some point you have to get something out of life that isn't just potential. You can't eternally be building up to something that you'll enjoy l…
Life is what happens when you're making other plans.
People are always spending today planning for tomorrow. Tomorrow then becomes today and the process repeats. People often forget you live your life today.
Re: Work/life balance should be difficult
#29The 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.
Our society needs people to haul garbage away. I would bet many of them don’t do it because it’s rewarding. It just gives them money to pay for things they care about. Should all those people leave hauling our garbage?
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Re: Work/life balance should be difficult
#30I'm not sure how "Dad sold his soul to work, regretted it forever, but couldn't change his ways" leads to the conclusion that "work/life balance should be difficult."
It's not really that hard, especially in STEM, where we tend to make more than enough money to meet basic needs. So, maximize your enjoyment, or your family's enjoyment. The equation is a bit different for everybody, but there's absolutely zero reason to work more than makes you happy and meets your needs.