work-life balance - balanced Worklife

‘Work-Life Balance’? For me this has always been something nobody really knows how to do, but should you do it wrong you inexorably face divorce, bankruptcy, cancer, a heart attack, or all of the above, and that before the age of fifty. Or even worse: the TOTAL BURNOUT, right here right now. It’s a terribly stressful concept, which I tried to avoid altogether. Until I was asked to write about it.

Since I was almost, but not exactly, sure what it meant, I looked it up.
“Work-Life Balance is a broad concept including proper prioritizing between ‘work’ (career and ambition) on one hand and ‘life’ (pleasure, leisure, family and spiritual development) on the other.”

What a most depressing Wikipedia quote that was. In clear, to pay my bills, I spend most of my waking hours dedicating myself to something that is neither pleasure nor leisure, that harms my family, and transforms me into an ungodly villain.

Phew!

To save humanity from the total burnout, I came up with a new concept:

The Balanced Worklife.

It’s a fine concept; the problem is I am not yet quite sure what it actually means.
Maybe: Rather than trying to stop the wicked ‘Work’ just seconds before it crushes the jolly ‘Life’, we should attempt to have a well-balanced ‘Worklife’; an entangled harmonious One-Thing.

Fine – and how do we do that? Well I guess it’s much in the intention. If I am frustrated and angry because I need to stop work to find a birthday present for my wife, and then am even more upset because this obliges me to spend the following Sunday finishing a manuscript, then that’s reasonable Work-Life balance, but an unbalanced Worklife. If I accept to work on a Sunday as a result of having made my wife happy the other day, well, then I feel much better, even though the facts are just the same.

Along these lines: If do something for the sole purpose of being rewarded (publication, promotion, recognition, friendship, love), then this will leave me frustrated or bitter, even if I succeed. However if I am totally dedicated to what I am doing, and do it as a true gift (for my boss, my institute, my family, society, science, humanity, the janitor, my own body), then I won’t depend on a reward to be happy.

The Work-Life balance is in our calendar, and the balanced Worklife is in our mind. And so are we.