Work-life Balance?
Work-life balance is on the rise. After the high plateau between 2017 and 2021, it had a drop for a few years, and now it appears to be at an all-time high. That plateau might have been caused by the burnout pandemic getting a new fuel from the COVID pandemic, where the reclaimed commute time was filled by struggling to accommodate work at home.
The term was coined by feminist movements in the 80s, where the meaning came from balancing career and cradle, but then it took a life of its own. Overnight, it became the mantra of HR consultants peddling wellness retreats, of self‑help books promising “10 steps to reclaim your weekends.” The work-life balance industry grew rapidly. Yoga retreats, digital detox apps, productivity planners promising that, yes, you can get it all. The cure for pointless work often involves…more work. You must plan your leisure, map your downtime, and measure your happiness.
The actual balance it achieved was to damage in equal measure our notions of life and work.
Worse, this cherished aim of work-life balance is literally perverse. We are given one life, which is insultingly short.1 Then, the best we can hope for, if we can achieve work-life balance, is to live only half of it, and pay for that with the other half, work. There is no possibility of living while we work.
Then what, exactly, counts as “life”? Family time? Meditation? Gardening? Netflix at 3 AM because you “earned” it? Meanwhile, work lurks like a vulture, ever ready to swoop when you dare to linger too long in the “life” zone.
This notion of paying with work so you can live is just the other extreme of understanding leisure only as a way to recharge your work batteries. This is so deeply ingrained that it is accepted as normal to call the leisure industry “recreational.” When you work, you damage yourself, so you need to be restored to do more work. But if you work really hard, you can afford exclusive packages that many others can't, a luxury pit-stop to make you run faster after.
The invention of the 40-hour workweek (down from 48) by Henry Ford had two motivations: one was the discovery that fewer hours make workers more productive, and the other was the expectation that having more time to spend money would boost the economy and create demand for products like Ford cars.
Some years later, Bertrand Russel defended the intrinsic value of leisure and suggested a 4-hour workday.2 Around the same time, Keynes predicted that as technology advanced by the end of the century, people in developed economies would only need to work 15 hours. Yet, due to the constant invention of bullshit jobs,3 even now, a quarter in the next century, we are not getting close. Finally, there are more talks about 4-day work week, but also strong opinions against it. Just a couple of months ago, the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said:
With a 4 day work week and work-life-balance we won’t be able to keep the wealth of this country.4
Here's the work-life balance again, but from the mouth of the leader of the third-largest economy in the world. So, its absurdity is not questioned, but its power is recognized, and recognized as a threat.
It is a threat, indeed, but for entirely different reasons.
Even if we replace the absurdity of work-life balance with something more meaningful, like work-leisure balance, it is still a double verdict: neither leisure nor work has intrinsic value. In 1932, in that same essay, Bertrand Russel wrote:
The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.
Work is downgraded to labour, as Arendt wrote in 1958,5 a repetitive cycle of production and consumption. And her third category, action, the highest expression of the human condition, shrinks and drops at the means-ends level of work.
Sometimes I wonder, could it be that the work-life balance is a resurfacing of the Aristotelian eudaimonia, but in a cripled form. The contemporary English word that comes closest is welfare? Eudaimonia is literally translated as “good spirit,” but spirit is an interpretation of daímōn, coming from “to divide.” Do we then have a mixture of the propensity of the Western civilized human to divide, combined with the tendency of the modern one to do something for the sake of something else? Is it then welfare, simply a cyclical and instrumental state of content, where humans are devoid of agency?
I took “insultingly short” from Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks.
In Praise of Idleness, by Bertrand Russell. (n.d.). Harper’s Magazine. https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/
Bullshit Jobs. (2019). https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Bullshit-Jobs/David-Graeber/9781501143335
Arendt, H. (2018). The Human Condition: Second Edition (M. Canovan & a N. F. by D. Allen, Eds.). University of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo29137972.html