Why work-life balance is bound to make you unhappy and unbalanced. And what we can do instead.

What is Work-Life Balance?

According to wikipedia:

 “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.” 

However in real life, Work-Life Balance means both of two things:

1) to pay my bills, I spend most of my awake life-time with something that is neither pleasure nor leisure, that hurts my family, and transforms me into an ungodly villain.

2) if I'm stressed and overworked, than it's my own fault, because I'm too dumb to get the work-life balance right.

This is depressing. Therefore I came up with a new concept: the Balanced Worklife. 

Yes, it’s all in the word order and the absence of the hyphen. 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 definitely crushes the jolly ‘Life’, we should attempt to have a well-balanced ‘Worklife’. An entangled harmonious Oneness. Fine – and how do we do that? Honestly, I don’t know. 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, than 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 that’s much better, even though the facts are just the same.

But intention is also that: If I work hard to be recognized or rewarded (at work or at home), then this will leave me frustrated or bitter, even if I succeed. However if I am totally dedicated to what I am doing, I do not need a reward to be happy – even though I am likely to get one as a result. In a nutshell: Be dedicated, and be aware of it, at any moment, and, on occasion, do all those things wise people in baggy cloths have told us for millennia. I mean, what are the chances they were all wrong?