Work-life balance and the future of work
Life is work, and work is life
As you read this, you are working. The photoreceptors in your eyes are converting the light on the screen into electrical signals that get sent to your brain, where the signals are translated into the letters you see.
When you’re sitting on the couch watching TV, your abdominal muscles are contracted to keep you upright in a seated position and your mind is processing the audio-visual experience.
Even when you sleep, your autonomic nervous system is working to keep your heart pumping and your lungs breathing.
You are always working. Being alive is a 24/7 full-time job. Your body is a machine with no off-switch.
The common understanding of “work”
But when someone says “I’m working,” we don’t think about the fundamental functioning of their body and their mind. Rather, we assume they’re doing their job, i.e., they’re doing whatever an employer pays them to do.
What about a parent who cooks dinner for their kids in the evening when they get home from their job? Is cooking for your kids work? No? Then what is it? Some would say it’s just part of being a parent.
What about an artist who wakes up early in the morning to make art before they commute to their job? Is making art work? No? Then what is it? Some would say it’s just a hobby.
In terms of what you’re actually doing, I don’t think there’s much of a difference between life and work. In either of the two modes, your body is making movements in the physical world and your mind is thinking thoughts. An activity becomes work when you’re getting paid to do it, but the activity itself doesn’t necessarily change.
For example, a parent could be paid to work at a restaurant, doing the exact same work of cooking a meal. But they choose to do the work for free for their family. Or, an artist could be paid to make the exact same art (assuming someone would be willing to buy it), but they choose to do it for free for whatever reason.
The mere fact that we are either paid or not paid to do certain activities is a weak differentiator to create such a semantic divide between life and work.
Why do we need separation and balance between our lives and our work?
Work-life balance has become a constant topic of discussion in recent years. Why? Presumably because we don’t currently have a balance between our work and our lives.
One of the main complaints I heard from coworkers and friends who were working from home during the pandemic was that there was no longer any separation between their work and their life.
But why do we need that separation in the first place?
I remember one individual telling me about how they would start working earlier and keep working later because their desk was in their bedroom and there was less of a “barrier” keeping them from opening their laptop to do a little more work at times when they otherwise (in the pre-pandemic world) wouldn’t have been in the office and, therefore, wouldn’t have been working.
My theory is that we need that separation because we try to compartmentalize our toxic work habits. Work stresses us out and exhausts us. So we can only tolerate so much work until we need more life to charge us back up. If we don’t get enough life and work becomes overwhelming, then we start to burn out.
But this only happens as a result of our work depleting us instead of filling us up. What if we changed the way we work so that it didn’t burn us out so much? What if we worked in a way that charged us up? What if we got as excited about working as we did about the best parts of the rest of our lives?
And this is precisely where I think it’s important to realize that, in theory, life and work are really no different, in terms of how our bodies and minds are engaged. Because we can take the same principles for how we live well and apply them to how we can work well, optimizing for human well-being instead of just for economic production.
In reality, however, our working habits and conditions are increasingly out of sync with the flow of natural, healthy human life.
Some of our modern work habits are toxic and non-human
The ways in which we work are diverse.
There’s blue-collar and white-collar, manual labor and knowledge work. But even those dichotomies aren’t exhaustive.
There are jobs for everything: serving food, maintaining national parks, cleaning, taking care of children, stunt doubling, selling used cars, digging holes, and the list goes on.
Some jobs are less toxic and more natural than others.
Performing manual labor outdoors seems to be more agreeable with our physical human nature. Knowledge work, on the other hand, is becoming particularly non-human. We aren’t evolutionarily designed to work on a computer all day. Our eyes aren’t designed to stare at pixels on a screen. Our bodies aren’t designed to sit in desk chairs.
When did work become work?
“In the earliest stages of human civilization, work was confined to simple tasks involving the most basic of human needs: food, child care, and shelter.”
Was it really “work” though? Or were we just doing what was necessary to survive?
In some sense, it couldn’t have been “work.” That word hadn’t even entered our vocabulary yet.
It certainly wasn’t employment. We weren’t being paid.
So what was it then?
When a cheetah chases down a gazelle, is the cheetah working?
I don’t think so.
The cheetah is just doing what’s natural: behaving like a predator, hunting for food. The same as a giraffe reaches its neck to eat leaves at the top of the tree, a plant drinks water through its roots from the soil, and bacteria multiply.
And it was the same for our early ancestors. When they hunted, cared for their young, and built fires in caves, they weren’t working, they were just surviving. In other words, they were just living.
So where did this concept of “work” come from?
The earliest form of division of labor may have been based on age and sex. Elders and youngsters, who lacked the physical abilities to hunt, gathered food. Women cared for the children, cooked, and also gathered. Men hunted.
Then, at some point, a farmer grew a surplus of food for the village, and he was willing to trade his food for tools (so the blacksmith profession began) and for a barn (so the carpenter profession began).
And this continued as increases in economic efficiency demanded more and more specialized labor. Now we have jobs for practically everything.
Each human no longer needs to produce a good or provide a service that immediately satisfies their own basic needs. Instead, we do whatever the economy demands in exchange for money that we can then use to pay for goods and services that satisfy our needs.
This is how work became separate from life. This is how work became work.
In 1938, U.S. Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established an eight-hour workday and a forty-hour workweek. (The eight-hour workday had been talked about before, but it became law with this legislation.)
Now, “work” is what you do between nine in the morning and five at night on weekdays. And everything else is “life.”
The way we work is already changing
The Great Resignation is happening. Remote work is on the rise. Tim Ferris wrote The Four-Hour Workweek. Companies are switching to four-day workweeks (not quite four hours just yet). The gig economy is accelerating. “Side hustles” are a thing.
Overall, people are demanding more control over the way they work.
Does more work-life balance mean less productivity?
Some evidence suggests that employees are actually more productive when they have better work-life balance. At some point, however, fewer labor hours inputted must result in less production outputted.
Thinking about this, I have two questions: Does productivity actually decrease? And if it does, is that a trade-off we’re willing to accept in order to have more work-life balance?
Let’s think about it on two levels: the individual level and the societal level.
The individual level
On the individual level, people are worried about making enough money to pay their bills. It’s hard to work less when you’re not making enough money to put food on the table.
But if you have plenty of money, then why would you continue to optimize for making the most amount of money possible, rather than trying to optimize your enjoyment of life? (I think there are actually some pretty clear reasons. One, in particular, is that in our capitalist American society, people seek esteem and even love as a reward for their economic success.)
And do you actually have to make less money in order to optimize your enjoyment of life? One thing I’ve noticed in my own profession (software sales) is that people learn to work more efficiently, i.e., they can do the same amount of work in less time—they “work smarter, not harder.”
Even when this happens, most people don’t work less. They work the same amount, or maybe even more. Why? Because the bar keeps getting raised. In a word, it’s greed. You realize how much you can make, then you reset your goals for what you want.
Now, I think it’s important to unpack the goal. In other words, why do people have the goals that they do? Some people have honorable goals.
Maybe you have a huge family and you need to make more money just to keep your family fed and clothed. Maybe you’re investing your money into an organization or a business that you believe can make a positive change in the world.
There are some industries that are essential to keep us all alive: food production, housing construction, and medicine.
And then there are industries that don’t seem to have much more purpose than growing the economic machine: finance and tech.
Now there’s definitely a place for these industries. Finance helps goods and services flow more efficiently. And there are economic efficiency improvements from tech.
But then there are hedge funds that care more about profit than impact. And there are tech companies that care more about getting to a one-billion-dollar valuation than their ostensible mission.
The societal level
On a societal level, fewer labor hours inputted would seem to result in slower economic growth.
But the same concept of “work smarter, not harder” applies here as well. Technology improves the efficiency of our labor-hour inputs. So we could theoretically work less and maintain at least the same rate of economic growth, but it would still be less than the maximum possible rate of economic growth.
Even if we could still grow the economy at a reasonable rate, would the world be accepting of people working fewer hours?
There are at least two reasons that our economy pushes toward the maximum possible rate of growth (and they are both man-made): One is the motivations that exist on the individual level that we just discussed. The other is the demand from investors for a return on their investments.
On the individual level, the motivations make complete sense (up to a certain point). We need to make money to survive. Beyond that, however, why do individuals still push to make more money? Because our society is organized in a way that makes us believe that satisfaction of the higher tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs will come from greater economic success.
But what about investors? What incentives do investors have to keep pushing for economic growth? Some investors are not exceptionally wealthy. They are just middle-class people with 401k accounts, trying to save for retirement. Other investors have more than enough and they still want more. Why? Again, because money is the game where we all applaud the winners. And people want to be applauded. Are there some altruistic investors? Sure. But are the majority of investors altruistic? I would guess not.
This is capitalism. The system continues to function based on the survival need of individual society members and the greed of owners and investors.
I call it “greed” because we seem to have clearly reached a point of excess. At one point in our history, economic and technological developments resulted in obvious improvements in our quality of life. We ascended to the top of the food chain. Then we wanted to make ourselves comfortable at the top. But what are we doing now?
It is clear what is driving working-class individuals. They are just trying to survive. But what is driving the owners and investors? Is it anything other than greed?
Why do we need to live our lives in virtual reality? Why do we need faster internet speeds? Why do we need more data storage space? Why do we need more streaming services? Why do we need more video content? Why do we need more furniture, clothes, makeup, toys, products, plastic?
Individuals continue to work because they need money to survive, so the global economy never runs out of human capital. But that doesn’t necessarily explain the growth. That just explains sustained operation at the same level.
The growth depends on entrepreneurs and investors. Some section of society has to be continuing to raise the bar—inventing new technology, creating new businesses, creating new job opportunities, and making investments.
What choice do we have?
The real state of the world now is a monetary-based economy with a hyper-specialized workforce. If an individual chooses not to play by these rules, they have two options. One, they can live outside of society and adopt a lifestyle similar to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Two, they can earn and save enough money to retire and stop playing the game as soon as possible.
Those are choices you can make on the individual level. Nothing about the world has to change. You could start doing either one of those today and nobody would stop you.
But what about on the societal level? Is ceaseless economic growth really what we want to do? Is that what we want to put all our time and energy into?
If not, how would we change it?
To a degree, it’s already happening. Individual workers are demanding better work-life balance and employers are having to meet these demands in order to continue to attract top talent. Also, more people are retiring earlier.
If these trends continue, labor inputs might decrease. Then again, the population is increasing. So we’d probably have to do some economic math to figure out the outcome of this scenario.
However, I think there’s a bigger shift that could happen. And that shift would be if we fundamentally changed our values as a society. Right now, we value greed and applaud those who get exorbitantly wealthy. This sends the signal to everyone that money and economic success are what we value as a society. Importantly, this signal is received by children.
I remember being young and having dreams of growing up and becoming rich. I felt this way because I saw the admiration, respect, and love that rich people received. I saw it in my community, in my history classes, and in the media.
But why do we still have those values? Maybe they made sense when we were still a struggling species. We needed to fight to survive. We didn’t have enough. But now, what more could we possibly want? We have all the physical luxuries imaginable.
A possible spiritual awakening on the societal level
Here’s where I’m going out on a limb: I think humanity might one day strive toward spiritual awakening. We will realize that satisfaction on the physical plane is limited and we will look higher for spiritual experiences. I don’t think this shift will be ubiquitous. Some will have to remain “behind” to operate the economy. But others of us might venture out to devote our time and energy to enlightenment instead of just the blind pursuit of more.
This happens now. But the way in which these people are regarded is what keeps more from pursuing this path. Think about your family reunion. If your uncle asks what you’ve been doing and you say you’ve been practicing meditation, prayer, and yoga, what will your uncle think? Versus if you tell your uncle that you just got promoted and bought a house. Your uncle will probably be more impressed by the latter.
This is the level at which what we value as a society must change before our youth and others are motivated to pursue spiritual enlightenment more than economic success.
We control our own evolution at this point
Unhindered economic progress can be detrimental to our quality of life because we spend too much time working and not enough time living. This is what we’ve already been discussing.
A new idea that I’d like to introduce is that unhindered economic progress might also have a negative impact on the world we live in.
So not only are we behaving in a way that is not optimally enjoyable in terms of the time we actually spend behaving that way, but the behavior also has a negative secondary impact in that it changes the world in a way that’s not ideal for human experience.
Our environment is constantly changing and we are constantly adapting. In the past, our environment changed in ways that were largely outside of our control. More recently, we’ve gotten to a point where we are controlling our own evolution because we control our own environment.
We’re building an environment in which humans become more like working machines and less like humans. More specifically, in the technological age, we are building an environment in which humans become more like computers and less like humans.
And this is happening because maximum economic production requires humans to work in certain ways. Recently, that certain way has been sitting in front of a computer monitor all day.
And there are signs that our working experience is going to become even more technologically immersed. Web3, virtual reality, and other trends seem to be leading toward a world where we live our lives fully online in a virtual world.
Not to mention, there are other more commonly discussed negative externalities from the way we work that impact our environment: pollution, landfills, deforestation, climate change, etc.
You can decide how you work and how you live
As an individual, you can choose to not play by the commonly accepted rules of the modern economy. You can either adopt a lifestyle similar to our hunter-gatherer ancestors or you can earn and save enough money to retire early.
The first option doesn’t work for me because I like being around people and I wouldn’t want to live in the woods alone. The second option is the one that I’m currently pursuing.
But I also feel a desire to help to change things on the societal level, instead of just solving the problem for myself.
I think the first step in making the change (or contributing to the change that’s already underway) is for people to realize that they have other options if they aren’t satisfied with the working conditions that are normalized in America.
We spend a significant percentage of our lifetimes working. In some ways, “how do you want to live?” is the same question as “what do you want to work on?”.
So how do you want to live? Do you want to spend half your waking hours working in a way that isn’t enjoyable, in pursuit of a mission that doesn’t make sense?
If your answer is no, then what are you going to do about it?