Why I no longer care about work-life balance
Ambitious people do not need a trade-off between work and life
Welcome to this week’s edition of Second Guess. Did you know Porsche Automobiles is owned by the Volkswagen Group, the company that makes the Golf and the Beetle, but Porsche also owns the Volkswagen Group? Did I hear you say, “WTF”?
If you missed last week’s edition of this newsletter, catch up: I argued that the 2023 presidential election might not change much, but it’s important we think it will.
And now, to today’s story…
I once hung out with a chief executive at a popular Nigerian tech startup and the subject of work-life balance came up. He said he didn’t believe in work-life balance and at the time, I thought it was a little weird, given that toxic bosses have recently been a problem in African startups. But months later, I no longer believe in work-life balance myself. I say this as someone who’s experienced toxic workplaces, shitty managers, and once worked two years without getting a single day off. Let me explain.
The problem with doing what you love and never having to work
We’ve all heard the saying, “Find a job your love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.” Well, I call bullshit.
For most people, work is something we have to do, not what we want to do, resulting in the fact that most people spend their working hours doing things they don’t find enjoyable. And so motivational speakers and career coaches have come up with this narrative that if we can somehow manage to find a job we love and get paid for doing things we’re passionate about, we’re always going to be excited to get up and go to work every day.
The fastest way to hate something you love is having to do it for 40-50 hours a week, with the threat of hunger and homelessness looming over your head.
On the surface, that sounds reasonable, but if you really deep it, it’s fancy-sounding bollocks.
While jobs exist that seem to be exciting on the surface, like content creation, skit making, travel, fashion design and modeling, art, and sports, etc, a huge part of these careers involves painfully repetitive work like endless meetings, hours and hours memorisation, 80-hour weeks of production and reshoots, and even long-term hazards like injuries.
Work—no matter how passionate you are about it—is work. If it weren’t, it’d be a hobby.
You’d think a video game tester would be a dream job, right? Who wouldn’t like to get paid to play the best video games in the world?
Well, the difference between you who plays Call of Duty for an hour every night, and a professional video game tester is that the latter has to spend thousands of hours replaying the same mission just to make sure there are no bugs. If you work in the entertainment or creative industry, a huge part of your work will involve a lot of boring work like endless meetings and email correspondence, just like every other job.
Work—no matter how passionate you are about it—is work. If it weren’t, it’d be a hobby.
Even if a dream job were to manage to live up to the hype initially, the fastest way to hate something you love is having to do it for 40-50 hours a week, every week, with the threat of hunger and homelessness looming over your head.
If you do find a job you love, you’ll have to work EVERY DAY of your life, potentially even more than if you were to be stuck at a boring job where you could just count hours until close of business. So how does work-life balance come in?
The not-balance of work-life balance
The term work-life balance implies that "work" and "life" are two different things. It implies that one has to stop where the other begins. And while for some people, it can suffice, for ambitious, passionate, and highly creative people, the model simply isn’t sustainable.
It’s important to note that careers differ. Work-life balance may work for, say, a surgeon who comes home every night after 10 gruelling hours in the theatre and just wants to watch TV and sleep. Careers and personalities are different. For a creative however, for whom ideas can come anytime, I don’t think it’s fair to regret having to write a draft of a concept note at 7 pm when the idea hit you two hours after the close of business day.
For ambitious and creative self-starters building things, achieving great things usually requires intensity and drive, often in creative bursts. The “balance” in work-life balance makes me think of someone standing in the middle of a fulcrum or weighing scale and attempting to balance it. When that fulcrum is balanced nothing’s moving. For creatives, that might as well mean death.
The drawbacks of regimented balance
Work-life balance feels too straitjacketed to me. As an ambitious, creative but lazy person who tends to procrastinate a lot, self awareness has taught me to realise my energy comes in bursts. And so, it’s important for me to maximise those bursts of energy. If I were to strictly practice work-life balance, I would restrict my work into tidy boxes of time per day. What happens when I close my laptop at 5 pm and an idea hits me while I’m preparing to sleep at midnight?
The beauty of the work-life flow
For me, I prefer a work-life flow of sorts. I’ve come to understand that I’m going to experience different wave patterns each day, and I prefer to optimise each burst of energy I get rather than focusing on a static level of balance and staying at that.
Last October, I wrote about burnout and mindfulness, In it, I argued we have to build small breaks into our lifestyles rather than compartmentalise our lives into different blocks of work and rest. I argued further:
For workaholics who like to take on new projects and veer dangerously toward burnout, they simply can’t just unplug from work as that might make them lose their sense of fulfillment and replace one stressor with another. However, something as simple as encouraging daily breaks can go a long way. Could workers take a quick 20-minute nap after a few hours of work, for example?
--You can read the full thing here:
Prioritising work-life flow rather than work-life balance helps me make sure that my work and my leisure can co-exist. If I exert myself today due to a deadline or adrenaline rush during content creation or execution, I know I’m going to make sure to take it easy the next day. I’m unafraid to take an urgent work call after closing hours because I expect my colleague or manager to see it as a courtesy rather than an expectation. I also expect them to give me a break the next day.
For lazy creatives like me, it doesn’t have to be either/or. We can have the fulfillment that comes with hard work flowing into the joy of having fun while resting or partaking in hobbies. We can love our jobs with sincerity and conviction and also love our personal lives.
Playing a balancing act is near-impossible in today’s fast-paced world without guilt. So rather than feel guilty for working during off hours, I’ll make sure to be truly present in whatever I find myself doing, whether at work or play and with whoever I’m with at any given point in time, whether colleagues, clients, friends, or family.
Where work-life balance asks the when, work-life flow asks the why, how, and what. Why am I doing what I’m doing? How does what I’m doing help improve the quality of my life in the short, medium, and long term?
Work-life flow is ultimately about how I manage my energy and where I invest it. It’s about aligning my passion with my profession, two things I care deeply about and understand that don’t have to exist separately or in conflict with each other. It’s me harmonising my day job, my social life, and my me-time and reveling in all the variety.
As an ambitious creative, work-life flow helps me understand that my energy won’t be the same every day, I won’t be able to consistently achieve 100% every day between 9 am to 5 pm, and that sometimes I might do my best work outside work, hours after office hours and take a midday nap the next day. And that’s okay too.
Having a work-life flow helps me be kind to myself and reward myself after I’ve achieved my work goals. I will do creative shit when I can and I will also take time for rest and hobbies. I don’t need to make my schedule regimented or over-optimise for some elusive balance.
Three things I enjoyed reading this week:
This heartwarming essay of a Nigerian evolving with Nigerian food in the diaspora.
This insightful analysis on the ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok
This story of how Pepper changed the world – but how many people know that?
I really enjoyed this piece. It reminds of what a friend of mine said one time regarding balance; he explains that it doesn’t always have to be 50-50 considering 70-30 also equals 100; basically there’s so many ways to arrive at a 100% of satisfaction without it looking like a regimented schedule we try to box our creativity in. I’m trying these days to follow this thought pattern of taking advantage of the random bursts of energy and relaxing when I have to. I wish more people look at it this way though. Thanks for sharing!
This article is enlightening and interesting. I really never believe in work life balance before. I had always learnt to work when I feel the urge or force myself to work when required by work and to enjoy life when I feel like or disengage from enjoying life when work comes.
This article provides insights into the different perception of work-life. A shift in paradigm from right balance to water-like flow.
Astounding!