Reading · 📼 This Analog Life

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In my previous essay → When setting goals triggers an existential crisis, I rolled the following live grenade into the middle of the room and then quietly walked away...

Work-life balance is bullshit.

Before you come at me with torches and pitchforks to burn the bridge of goodwill I’ve spent over a decade building with you and the rest of my creative community, please afford me the rest of this essay to explain myself before you light the match, k?

I strongly believe that we should build our work around our lives, not the other way around as we’ve been conditioned to do for decades. Life is so much bigger than job titles, awards, and the gigantic housing and car payments we can’t afford. Life should be about creating cool shit and meaningful moments with the most important people in our lives and having the time and energy to prioritize our own needs more than our employers’.

I also strongly believe that we should be paid for the unique value our skills and experiences bring to each project and the impact our creative choices have on the end product (and the revenue said choices generate!). We should not be treated like widgets measured only by the hours we pound away at our keyboards.

And I even more strongly believe that the rampant abuse and exploitation of those in creative fields like us who spend much of our careers accruing ‘Exposure Bucks’ and paying ‘The Passion Tax’¹ for years on end MUST STOP. We are not saving lives, and we shouldn’t have to pay with our own in service of pleasing the shareholders.

Having said all of this...work-life “balance” is not the answer. All this pursuit has led us towards is the never-ending guilt from failing to achieve it. With “balance” as the destination we’re reminded on a daily basis that where we are today is not where we are supposed to be and that what we are doing is never enough.

The pursuit of work-life balance—especially in our out-of-control post-pandemic dystopian hellscape—is not only futile, I also believe it’s meaningless.

I could spend the next 70,000 words writing about the sheer futility of trying to achieve all of your goals and checking every item off your bucket list whilst also perfectly “balancing” all of your other most important relationships and priorities to ultimately live the most optimized version of your ideal perfect and #blessed life (and then monetizing it on Instagram!), or I could just direct you to Oliver Burkeman and his NYT bestselling masterpiece Four Thousands Weeks, the best book ever written on time management.

To quote Oliver:

”Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved work-life balance. The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control—when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life...and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about.”

🎧 Listen to my podcast with Oliver Burkeman to learn how to make the most of your four thousand weeks

Perhaps if we turn up the nostalgia meter to ‘11’ and roll back to The Wonder Years we can picture a world where we as a society perfectly balanced our time and energy equally between our job jobs and our family. But I honestly can’t remember a single episode where Kevin’s dad was living his best life. (And we all know June Cleaver was lighting doobies in the laundry room during commercial breaks after wrangling The Beaver all day…her son that is, you dirty bastards).

A portrait of work-life ‘balance’ during The Wonder Years

Perhaps in a world without emails, social media, Zoom chats, TikTok, Tinder, the algorithms around every corner, and the never-ending dings & chimes constantly vying for our attention we could make a concerted effort to design a more balanced life given we have now trained the robots to access, summarize, and simplify all the collective knowledge of mankind in a single verbal prompt. But with the way we have (misguidedly) redesigned our modern society around being hyper-connected 24/7, the lines between work and life are so blurred now, short of the actual ‘severance’ procedure I don’t believe we’ll achieve any form of ‘balance’ between work and life ever again.

For a brief moment during the pandemic lockdowns we were teased with the life-changing prospect of “working from home,” only to watch our corporate overlords first bastardize it into “living at work” until they ultimately used their newfound leverage of the vastly underemployed workforce to forcibly shove most of us back into our four-walled coffins so nicely accented by the $20 Target Torchiere Task Lamp.

ChatGPT’s eerily accurate rendition of my personal hell.

I’m NEVER one for hyperbole (👈 see what I did there?), so I’m not sure I agree with Oliver when he asserts that nobody in the in the history of humanity has ever achieved work-life balance. I have no doubt there are those select few who are perfectly balancing their time, energy, and attention across work and life in equal proportions.

But here’s the thing...I also bet they’re fucking miserable.

Nothing worthwhile in life comes easy.

Pick your favorite celebrity, author, entrepreneur, YouTuber, director, writer, CEO, inventor, TED talker, musician, or anyone else that you genuinely admire (not to be confused with those you simply ‘follow’). Anyone who has created something meaningful enough to access the center of your soul has sacrificed balance in the short term.

If you do creative work for a living, I’m guessing you aren’t doing what you do for the stability or the predictable cashflow. You want to create things that allow people to feel something, and you can’t bring meaning into this world created from the depths of your soul if you’re clocking in and out equally between work and life. This is not to say that life, your health, and your family shouldn’t always be a priority even in the middle of a big project, but ‘balanced’ is not the way to manage your priorities if you want your work to matter. There is nothing that scares me more than a stable, predictable 9-to-5 job job that affords me the equal time to be at home with my family. Because then I’d spend forty hours per week hating my work balanced with another forty hours per week hating my life. And that does not a healthy household make.

I’m not interested in work-life balance, I’m interested in work-life fulfillment.

I’m interested in waking up excited about the challenging creative problems I get to solve all day long (even if sometimes that day is REALLY long).

I’m interested in going to bed creatively exhausted but also at peace with how I spent my time and energy on any given day.

And I’m interested in pushing my limits both creatively and physically to see what I’m really made of because I’ve only got this one life and these four thousand weeks, and I don’t want to lie on my deathbed regretting the things I never tried for the sake of maintaining ‘balance.’

For years I searched for a more effective way to integrate work and life according to my definition of success, and more importantly fulfillment. Then one evening it hit me while reading Four Thousand Weeks (in the appendix of all places) where Oliver writes about “Deciding in advance what to fail at.”

“To live this way is to replace the high-pressure quest for “work-life balance” with a conscious form of imbalance, backed by your confidence that the roles in which you’re underperforming right now will get their moment in the spotlight soon.”

That was it!

A “conscious” form of imbalance.

STRATEGIC. IMBALANCE.

Since stumbling upon that passage I have now spent the next several years completely reorganizing how I manage my days, my projects, my priorities, my work, and my life. Now by approaching everything through the lens of strategic imbalance I no longer have to carry the guilt of living a heavily imbalanced life in pursuit of difficult and meaningful goals...

...As long as my goals are clearly defined and they strategically lead me towards the greater vision I have for my work and my life.

...As long as I am also clear on my values and what/who I am not willing to sacrifice along the journey.

...And most importantly as long as I can continue to be present for the most important people in my life during the moments that matter.

Because otherwise, my life would just continue to be an imbalanced mess.

If you were to ditch the futile pursuit of work-life “balance” and instead approach your life with more “strategic imbalance,” what needs to change?

Feel like you're always behind and never enough? Blame work-life "balance."

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