Adult See-Saws

When talking to friends about their current or future job opportunities, a term that often plagues our conversation is “work-life” balance. Companies seek to market themselves as places with a so-called “good” balance, which typically means an above average number of paid vacation days, with a few trendy startups boasting an unlimited amount. After recently joining a software engineering company that has very competitive vacation benefits, conversations about “work-life” balance have become almost unbearably frequent. Prior to joining industry, the notion of “work-life” made no sense to me. Academia had been my life, and I did not view it as separate from my “real” life. Of course, there are deadlines, papers, projects and meetings to complete that were discrete from my more recreational pursuits, but I, like many of my peers, viewed these simply as different activities. I liked some activities more than others, but they were still all part of a larger narrative, namely, the story of me. The term “work-life” balance is only used by a particular group of people. To be clear, there are many people for whom work can be a ceaseless struggle; single mothers who work 16 hour shifts, undocumented immigrants who spend must work twice as hard as their peers for lower pay, and many more. There are also those for whom work has never been an issue, such as the children of the excessively rich who need not spend a day working in their lives, or at the very least not spend any significant amount of time in any job. This term is reserved only for those of us who happen to have the (mis?)fortune of living “comfortably”. That is, those of us who are lucky enough to be making enough money that it is not a major concern in our lives, but not enough money where it is no concern. The sorts of jobs that have holiday parties, beer on Thursdays, and when you clock in at 9 and leave at 5. Our lives are not excessively hard, nor excessively easy. Just like everyone else, we are faced with our own challenges, but the most curious one seems to be the challenge of balancing “work” and “life”. The idea that these two things are at complete odds with each other, that there exists a see-saw of work and life and that once you have more of one, you must have less of the other, is taken at face value and hardly ever examined. At the office, the overwhelming majority of conversations are about what people are doing over the weekend. They typically go like this: “What did you get up to? Taking any fun vacations?” “How was the family trip out to….” What is the source of this dichotomy? Why have we begun to demarcate our experiences so strongly into either the camp of work, or the camp of life? Perhaps it comes from the industrialized way of setting distinct work hours. From 9am-5pm, you are expected to work, and the general expectation is that most people should be working 40 hours a week. If one works more than that, they feel entitled to ask for overtime, or extra pay, and in the United States, on a federal level, there are specific laws regulating the amount of work that can be requested of you. Thus, the idea that all things that happen between 9am and 5pm Monday-Friday belong to work is reinforced repeatedly, and this could be seen as a strong reason for the origin of the work-life balance. However, this explanation is incomplete. Most things follow strict schedules that have not led to the same extreme separation we see with work and life. K-12 education has set schedules as well yet we do not hear students complaining of a school-life balance. Students of course need to balance their time in school with their extracurricular activities. The point here though, is that the distinction is not nearly as stark and seemingly unbridgeable. This is due in part because the nature of school itself is often enjoyable. When you see children in developing countries get access to education, it is a look of unimaginable joy. Videos travel through the internet of children cheering when their schools receive funding, get access to new technologies, and enhance the teaching process. In a recent documentary on the Bard Prison Initiative, prisoners who never had the opportunity to access higher-level education are given the opportunity to participate in college-level programs, and as one person describes it, it is as if the prisoners have been deprived of water all their lives and were just now getting their first drink. There is something unequivocally special about learning that loosens the idea that it is separate from the rest of our lives, despite its (at times) rigid schedule. One could then make the argument that work-life balance comes from our predilection towards hedonism. We are always seeking to maximize the amount of pleasure and happiness in our lives, through food, sex, experiences, travel, entertainment, etc. In this view, having a job serves one function only: to fund experiences that add pleasure to our lives. If this were indeed our primary focus, then we would naturally only seek out jobs that give us the maximum pay. After all, this would increase our ability to perform activities that mean more to us. Yet this cannot be the whole story either. There exist many things that I would not do for any amount of money; there is at least some amount of desire to be doing something I enjoy for work. Indeed, many people turn down higher paying jobs for jobs they find more meaningful or more in-line with their interests. So why must there still be this distinction? I would like to advance the view that it is the product of the company-employee relationship and that this has led to a destructive environment for those of us living “comfortably”. Ultimately, the company is its own entity, and just like we may have relationships with people, we form a relationship with the company. This is not to say that we form a relationship with other members of the company, such as our managers or peers. I am referring to the relationship we have with the company itself and this sort of relationship is nearly universal amongst all employees and their companies, regardless of location or industry. Upon starting any job, one must sign a contract. This very act degrades a person’s humanity. The company expects you to output “work” however they have defined it, and they wish for it to be done in exactly the way that they have laid out for you. They set expectations for you, tell you where you have to be and when, and put you in competition with your peers. You are told that you will be reviewed on some scheduled basis, and that your compensation is some function of that review. You are reminded that the contract could terminate at any point, if your work is not up to par, as there are always people in need of money. Ironically, you are also subjugated to time based contracts that dictate how long you are required to work for a company before you can voluntarily leave (without some monetary penalization). It is hard to be put into this situation and not feel as if you are merely another cog in the machine, expected to perform one function mindlessly to the standard expected of you. To make up for this treatment, the concept of work-life balance comes in. The company recognizes that they have stripped you of some level of individual freedom and happiness and compensates by saying you can have weekends, a set number of vacation days a year, and a promise on the limit of hours you will work. I am sure not all people will agree with me. Many people enjoy their work and do not find their relationships with their companies to be at all like what I have just described. However, there most certainly exists some subset of people for whom this is true; they are forced into viewing their life as separate from work due to the way in which the company has established its relationship with its employees. This may not even be a problem for some people. Many will be content that this is the way things are. For others, a deeper understanding of our relationship with our employers is crucial to living in a world where work and life do not seem so far apart.