Why Work-Life Balance is Bad Idea
Although I am firmly allied with the mission and spirit of all the professionals and organizations who use the term “work-life balance” as something to strive for, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s fundamentally flawed, a dangerous trap, an all-around bad idea.
Superficially Sensible
The concept is enormously popular - over 10 million results for “work-life balance” on Google as of this writing - and it’s easy to understand why.
- In the United States, the average number of working hours is probably the highest it’s been in seventy five years.
- Five million workers in the UK put in almost two months worth of unpaid overtime a year.
- Ninety percent of working adults said they are concerned they do not spend “enough time” with their families.
- Seventy percent said they don’t have a healthy “balance between their personal and work lives”.
It would certainly seem, on the surface, that “work” and “life” are out of balance.
Plenty of people will come to the defense of the idea of “work-life balance”. The defense basically comes down to this: “What? You think work and life should be out of balance? If not that, what could you possibly mean?” Most people seem either shocked or a little confused when they hear the assertion that work-life balance is a bad idea.
That confusion itself derives from being blinded by the frame of reference created by the very phrase in question. Bad ideas have a way of trapping us within their own terms. Bad ideas prevent us from assessing their utility by restricting us to the wrong questions. In this case: How do I keep my work in balance with my life? But that doesn’t sound like a bad question, does it? It sounds utterly sensible, until you look at the consequences.
Five Unfortunate Consequences
The consequences of the work-life balance idea all stem directly from the inherent meanings of the phrase: First, “Work” and “Life” are two separate things. Second, “Life” is in jeopardy from “Work” and must be protected from it. Third, the way to protect “Life” is to have it in some kind of equilibrium with “Work”. Inherent in the idea of work-life balance is fundamental separateness and opposition of work and life and therein lies the problem.
The fact is that work is a part of life, not in opposition to it. The fact is that what we all seek is joyful work-life integration, not some sort of painful detente. The fact is that work-life balance is the sad refuge of those who have decided that work is not worth saving.
There exist useful ideas that don’t fit the facts, but work-life balance isn’t one of those. Instead, there are five very unfortunate consequences to it: It reduces work to a job or a paycheck. It writes off work as an arena for change. It reinforces consumer culture as the dominant source of meaning in life. It encourages the retreat from the public sphere. And it jeopardizes the very private sphere it seeks to protect.
What is work? When we stop and think about it, we know that it’s not just what we get paid for. (We have a better word for that. It’s called a “Job”.) If we volunteered to do it, it would still be work. Similarly, there are things that we do for free that are justifiably called work. And yet, we persist in using the word to describe a necessary evil, something sadly distinct from play or love, from family or community. It helps us resolve the cognitive tension that comes from doing something we, at least at times, dislike. The result is a vicious cycle of distancing and neglect.
By writing off work as a part of our lives, we write it off as an arena for change. We think only of containing work (keeping it in “balance”) so that we can get on with the rest of our lives (which we call our “Life”). But to write off something as profoundly part of life as work is like writing off our bodies. These things are so connected to everything else, that we fight a losing battle, retreating further and further until there is almost nothing else that defines us as who we are.
One of the most powerful frames of reference left to us after we write off work as a source of meaning is our role as consumers. After all, work is about our role as producers in our culture. When we give up on work, a lot of what is left to us is the choices we make about what to buy and the relationships that are mediated by what we buy. We think about how we spend our money, rather than how we spend our time. And of course, how we spend our time is how we spend our lives. It may well be that one of the great drivers of consumerism is the consent we give to have work stripped of meaning.
It gets worse. By retreating from agency in our work lives, we lead a retreat from agency in the public sphere in general. Our political thinking shifts away from systemic analysis and citizenship is reduced to expressions of culture or concern with effects on private life. Even if we are otherwise engaged citizens, so long as we willingly pay a tax of a third of our weekday hours, the bulk of our productive energies are going to fuel an economic machine that commodifies every aspect of our lives.
Thus, in the end, even our so-called private life can’t be an authentic expression of ourselves. The human spirit being what it is, there will always be elements of our best selves that sneak out, no matter how commodified our private lives have become. Nevertheless, the choices available to us in our private lives are shaped by the world of work and at best we get to draw a smaller and smaller circle around the parts of our lives that are truly ours.
The Integral Alternative
The obvious alternative to the schizophrenic concept of work-life balance is healthy work-life integration. If our productive roles in the world were integrated with the rest of our lives, then they would be as much an expression of who we are and who we’re becoming as anything else. Just as importantly, there would be synergy. Work would support and be supported by our relationships, our home life, our community, our role as citizens.
This is not a new idea. Political thinkers of many persuasions have explored both the history and the future of a holistic notion of work. It’s been discussed by anthropologists, utopians, and career coaches alike. But the forces lined up against it are substantial, far more so than the mistaken survival driven notion of balance.
It’s important to acknowledge the numerous barriers to the concept of work-life integration. There are the obvious economic and social challenges. It’s a far taller order than retreating into a smaller and smaller circle of private life. There are also psychological barriers. The notion of balance has such appeal precisely because it allows us to temporarily dodge the tension that comes from aiming for what we really want.
The cheaper concept of balance is rhetorically dominant right now, if its millions of results on Google are any indication. Right now, there are exactly 346,000 results for “work-life integration”. By the time you read this, there should be 346,001. Will you add the next one?
Posted: January 27th, 2008 under The Ideas.
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Comments
Comment from Michael
Time: January 29, 2008, 11:25 am
Many people who seek work-life balance aren’t saying that they think their work is worthless; they’re saying that they think there are multiple distinct domains in their lives that are worthy. Some are seeking a way to avoid worrying about their work 24 hours a day. Some are trying to find an employer who won’t assume that they love their job so much they won’t mind 70-hour weeks or insistent phone calls while they’re bathing their kids or making love. Some want to have more than one passion in their lives, and make sure that they can have a job they care about without having to annihilate their interests in art, athletics, or social causes.
Some just recognize that their work is hard on them, and they need to deliberatley stake out time to enjoy life and recuperate.
I think you are making “balance” into a straw man. Nowhere else in the language does “striking a balance” mean that you consider one thing miserable and worthless, and the other thing the only source of meaning and pleasure. If anything, the need for work-life balance is often greatest among people who otherwise give too *much* of their time to work!
I do agree that “work vs. life” is a poor dichotomy, since your idea of living should include your work. Balancing work and everything else is just one part of trying to live a well-balanced life. I think the difficulty is that work consumes the plurality of almost anyone’s time, and so it ends up taking center stage in the effort. This might be the right place to look for a better rhetoric.
Comment from Patty Hill
Time: January 29, 2008, 12:19 pm
I may try to write more later, but the reason I can’t now is the very point of my comment.
I very much appreciate and agree with your view that one’s ‘work’ is indeed a very important part of one’s life. It is an exciting and empowering perspective that I wish more people understood. But I still see a real struggle with the Work-FAMILY balance.
As a single mom of three young children working part time from home in the social development arena, I am frequently struggling over spending my hours on work I love that also pays the bills, vs. attending to the emotional and educational needs of my children and day-to-day administriva of running our household. And this struggle is real.
I work for an incredibly forward-thinking virtual small business consulting firm that honors and celebrates our family life. Not only do they recognize the value of the skills that busy parents bring to their work (incredible logistics management, for one), but they also respect family needs and events. If an employee is about to have a child, it is seen as something to celebrate. Employees are respected as responsible and highly professional individuals who know how to manage their own work.
Yet still we all face what I see as an inevitable balancing act over raising kids and getting the work done. Yes, some integration can be done (and I’m not referring to sticking the kids in front of SpongeBob while I finish a report, though unfortunately that’s been done).
For part of the Take Your Child To Work day last year, I had my older two stay home and watch the video-taped ‘American Idol Gives Back’ while I worked at my computer. Throughout this show they saw videos of work in Africa with malaria, and HIV and AIDS — and at each commercial break, I would call them over and explain the data analysis I was working on at that moment — charts monitoring the impact of malaria and HIV interventions in hospitals in Rwanda, and similar work. It was enlightening to them to make those connections.
But the fact is, I believe that the opportunity for such integration is limited.
For me, the discussion about Work-Life, or more accurately, Work-Family balance is about acknowledging that we have other important roles and relationships in our lives that are separate from the work we do. And I’d love to say more on that, but I have a report due before the kids get home from school!
Comment from resonance
Time: January 29, 2008, 1:45 pm
What do you want your readers to do, in terms of concrete actions? You’ve said wanting work-life balance is a bad thing, and instead we should be striving for work-life integration. What do you mean we should be doing on a practical level?
I enjoy having different spheres of life, rather than having work integrated with my friends and family and hobbies. I’ve found that when they’re not distinct, my obligations at work take up all my time - but when I deliberately designate time as non-work time, it allows me to do things that are priorities for me but not for my co-workers. I’d like to have my work duties not expand to take up all the time I’m not eating, sleeping, or showering, but it’s not in anyone’s individual interest to lower their demands on me, and so I have to set boundaries. I’m currently looking for jobs with work-life balance because I’d prefer to have the option of not working ninety hours a week.
Comment from Sonia Lyris
Time: January 29, 2008, 1:54 pm
I think you can’t help but make work one thing and not-work another as long as work has money as compensation and not-work has something else as compensation. As an employer, I was always faced with this challenge: how do you motivate an employee to put their best passion into the work when we all know damned well that they wouldn’t do it but for the monetary compensation? My approach was to convey the message that money was NEVER enough to compensate the employee for what I wanted from them. So I would tell them that up front, taking money from being the hidden motivation to being an insufficient given, and ask them what they needed from the company to do their best work. Reframing compensation is part of changing the notion of work, which is part of changing the whole idea of balance. IMNSHO.
Comment from L. VanDervort
Time: January 31, 2008, 5:21 pm
Odd how no where in the assessment comes the real life fact that given no constraints, employers (or clients) will push for more time or productivity. They care not if your life is integrated or balanced. They just want more. Balance is about knowing where to establish boundaries. Life with no boundaries is at the whim of everyone else, but ourselves.
Comment from Nancy Barros
Time: February 4, 2008, 4:17 pm
I would just like to say the ultimate for me is not work-life balance but rather life-work process. As we all know it is not the destination but what we experience along the road called life that gives us the greatest pleasure, satisfaction and rewards. So to find your life work….simply put, would put you IN balance, wouldn’t it?
Comment from Kivi Miller
Time: February 5, 2008, 7:30 am
I loved the title of this article, because it’s how I feel. As a self-employed, work-at-home professional with two small children, my work and my life are integrated.
I agree with Patty that the bigger struggle is work-family for someone like me. My kids get more time with me because I am home all the time (with a nanny during working hours), but they also see me in front of a computer screen for long stretches of time, refusing to play with them.
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