Is "Work-Life Balance" a Myth?
(What if life is about letting it all flow together?…)
The Trap of the "Always-On" Culture
Returning from an early morning walk a few days ago, I ran into an old colleague that quit her corporate job to realign her life. Her aim was to reset a structure she had increasingly felt suffocated by, as she had been drumming to the oars of a dominant rhythm.
While she highlighted the newfound freedom of how to navigate her days, she also admitted to feeling challenged by the absence of external structure.
It is a fine line to toe—going with a forceful flow that serves as a frame and sense of security, or dancing to the waves of each moment of our own accord.
Being relieved from having to set up our own agenda can be a way of easing the pressure of self-responsibility. Yet it can become a hook beyond the anchor of seeming certainty when we no longer know how to un-hook.
The advent of smartphones, laptops, and high-speed internet has fostered an "always-on" culture. We can access work emails, messages, and documents at any time from anywhere.
Being reachable at all hours can be quite the hustle in practice. Our devices handed to us by an employer can turn out to be driving our every move with an expectation of constant availability.
Being frantically connected non-stop has become a bewildering status symbol within the fast-paced world of wanting to progress at all hours. It's got us walking in a literal bow towards our phones on our daily commutes.
It's also what seems to make us lose touch with watching out for each other. I wonder at times:
To what degree we are neglecting our responsibility for the moment we are in, too distracted to be present.
Recently, while on the subway, I witnessed an elderly woman panicking about missing her stop as she couldn’t get up due to the shaky break maneuvers. It took several attempts for anyone to notice her distress, as the entire carriage was absorbed in their screens.
We often say we're "too busy to notice.” But what are we actually missing, as the crucial moments in life aren't always scheduled in our calendars?
The Challenge of Navigaging Being Remote Controlled
When I first lived in New York, BlackBerries were on their stellar rise before their legendary fall. Being supplied with that device created an immediate shift in visibility that I didn’t question initially. It fed a desire to feel needed, waking up to a load of emails from several time zones.
The setup put me on a line of constant communication—at times akin to a teacher's pet, hooked on a dopamine loop. I found myself sending emails before my morning run, checking messages while brushing my teeth, and often being hollered at by cabdrivers as I squeezed in a quick response while walking to work, oblivious to the traffic.
It felt like being in this haze of everyone being always online, each competing for speed in replies. There was this seduction of instant reactions making us feel important, initiating a frantic ping-pong of accelerating exchange.
And while occasionally doubt piped up if the device was a generous support system, or a remote control we felt steered by, there was no time to figure out how effective feeling this busy actually was.
What initially felt empowering subtly turned into an expectation of 24/7 availability; it felt like a bottomless pit of responding fast, triggering the followup. Nothing ever seemed enough. Constantly multi-attending to emails spilled into responding whilst in the meetings to “kick things off immediately”, not wanting to lose a second.
When traveling with friends on scheduled “off times”, several of us often have struggled to get our mind out of our inbox, challenging the overall energy, when the stress we carry comes along for the ride.
Turns out, it's tricky to choose when and how to respond when those around you have grown accustomed to immediate reactions.
It’s a prominent challenge of our modern times—flexible work arrangements offering benefits, while also leading to work spilling into every hour of the day and night.
As the external circumstances might be something we can’t change that easily, the crucial challenge is how to apply your own sovereignty on an externally implemented guidance system.
The Problem With "Quiet Quitting" as a Fix
The phenomenon of "quiet quitting" has been gaining traction, as people look to get their life back by passively doing the bare minimum.
It often seems to backfire though, as we underestimate how that approach can wear down our enthusiasm and connection to our work.
Instead of finding relaxation, we might find ourselves pulled toward a disengaged state that can feel surprisingly paralyzing and lacking in the energy we thought we would regain.
There seems a deeply rooted truth we overlook in this mechanism of quietly stepping into bare minimum autopilot: the crucial connection between being engaged and enjoying what we do.
I suspect it’s what leads to a kind of internal burnout that comes from a lack of feeling we matter.
So what happens when we go from one extreme to the other?
What is it that hurts our soul so crucially, despite getting off the externally driven agenda?
The Power of a Blurry, Integrated Life
In the family culture I was raised in, work and life were always intertwined, as my artist parents lived an “uncommercial” schedule.
Creative work merged with all aspects of life; there were no off-limit days for practice, as the commitment was to a personally attuned goal. Students came any day of the week to merge countless agendas. The social circles were never clearly distinguishable between colleagues, students, and friends—a colorful variety merged in unconventional ways.
Evening jobs and concert tours during school vacations were regular features in our household. Holiday seasons meant heightened performances rather than leisure with friends, which I admittedly wasn´t always a fan of, feeling exposed to constantly having to share space.
The approach is mirrored in the words of L.P. Jacks, a prominent English educator, who pointed out that “A Master in the Art of Living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure… To himself, he always appears to be doing both.”
What if there is a deeper truth to navigating blurred edges instead of wanting to force structure into place?
What if finding what truly aligns with our soul's desire is the antidode to seeking illusory solidity in pre-defined agenda?
What if we can burn out by doing barely anything if it´s not feeding our soul, just as much as burning out from juggling too many tasks?
Maybe you thrive on a level of involvement with your work that is not understandable to someone else's scale. It's up to every one of us to define how we spend our energy.
Maybe you are brave enough to pursue paths others may not understand. It's about how you want to live on a daily basis. It's about your personal truth of what makes you feel alive in the moments you relate with.
What if you surprise yourself by being more okay with a messy, authentic, blurry-edged life schedule than you ever imagined?
Maybe you get closer by aligning with what makes your heart beat to the pull of your soul.
Creativity through Collaboration
My collaborative upbringing taught me about constantly cooking up creative projects by bringing together diverse people—essentially co-creating life.
The main reason I stayed at my last corporate job for almost a decade was the exceptional community of talented individuals merging to a complex whole.
We functioned together by embracing the inevitable “messiness” of everything impacting the official agenda. Our team dynamic propelled us through high-pressure challenges while sharing life's milestones: weddings, divorces, funerals, pregnancies, illnesses, birthdays—sharing diets, exercise regimes, binged TV series, laughter, and tears.
Admittedly, there’s a side of me that could feel challenged by the proximity of our team being so interlinked, similarly to not always being at ease with finding a daily acquaintance at our dinner table when growing up. Having a side of a loner, I crave moments away from the social buzz to recharge—feeling drained by constant company. Turns out that self-observation is the key, as so often:
Aligning with the “messiness” is about the art of knowing ourselves intimately enough to know what helps us through, not necessarily around it.
It's about knowing what works as a support system, and what drains our energy.
It's about surfing the waves of our personal flow while dancing with the big waves inevitably crashing down on us.
Finding Your Calling in the Messiness
What if a “mission statement” that traditionally is meant to promote the core of our work is more about a mission of life?
What if feeling a deeper connection to what you do “for a living” is what will make work less heavy? What if the key is to work and live in a way that you don’t constantly feel the need to escape?
A fisherman will thrive out of the harbor, the same way a nomad will thrive on the road, or a pilot will want to fly and not stay put.
What if this is not a luxury or something reserved for experts and creatives, but a pragmatic approach to spend our limited energy more efficiently? What if this is our path of “finding our calling” as we follow the intuitive pull of our soul?
“Where the longing lies, the story is found,” as a German proverb suggests.
What if we make our biggest impact in life by listening to our longing instead of to the clear-cut idea of work as a strictly managed means to an end?
What if aligning with our core essence is our key to save ourselves, so we don't get hooked on looking for external rescue?
And if you take Charles Bukowski’s words to heart: “Nobody can save you but yourself… It's a war not easily won but if anything is worth winning then this is it.”
So what if balancing life and work is about initially getting to know yourself?
What if it's not about a strict separation of things in life, but about engaging with a dance where the lines will always be blurred? Kids will barge into a planned “do-not-disturb” moment to radically request your attention, your energy will not at all align with your plan, the day you choose to wind down is the day you feel a deep urge to propel your project forward, and the day you planned on finishing a task is the one you need all your energy to maintain your basic function.
Maybe living life fully is partially about getting aquatinted with constantly feeling irritated - building resilience by training our muscle of tolerance and acceptance when feeling uncomfortable.
How we respond to the circumstances we are faced with defines the quality of our life.
It’s not about controlling our external circumstances, trying to neatly separate them in to clear cut slates. It’s about navigating our inner experience to master the art of finding balance right within the messyness of our daily existence.
Have you contemplated for yourself:
Do you have your own definition of success?
Where do your work and leisure merge? Do you like those blurred lines or do they drain you?
What would your "mission statement" for life look like?