I’m tired of hearing people talk about work life balance.
The common view on resolving work/life conflict – advises us to create a balance between our contending life domains. Parts of our world locked in a competition over a scarce resource – ourselves. This is just one approach and taking this approach on as the gospel dispensed will either leave you in an experience of dissonant stasis, stagnation, or internal rejection producing a paradoxical imbalance. If that sentence was exhausting to read imagine living that sentence … exhausted.
What are the alternatives to seeking work/life conflict resolution by balance? I know of two and now doubt there are others:
ALTERNATIVE ONE: WORK LIFE HARMONY
In my therapeutic practice you get an opportunity to explore what a harmonious resolution to the work/life conflicts means to you, looks like, and how it can be shared and applied to practical effects on an individual level – in your life.
For example – a practical application of work/ life harmony given recent widespread lay off … should you find yourself at the point of an involuntary professional life transit let me tell you, it will be a circus.
Accept it. Work it like the circus it is.
When acrobatics go horribly wrong and the professional-career-trapeeze-artist plummets to a ground splattering stop – a one ring circus ringmaster refunds tickets to a swarm of traumatized, horrified, and disgruntled spectators – a wise ringmaster will run a three ring circus. when acrobats fail they just sends in some clowns and a dancing bear. they redirect audience attention. they triple their tickets.
My father’s ‘circus‘ horrors took shape in the layoffs, too – it was oil patch 80’s – not a tech-deck-reshuffle that is playing out today. His three ring circus that he created was about job security and it worked for him, for me and all of my siblings, and can work make it work for you:
Ring one: go and get a formal education in a professional industry that requires it a its point of entry.
Ring two: get a certification in a manual skill you can do in any geographic location.
Ring three: chose a hobby you will be dedicated to then find where it intersects other people and let your passion make money.”
ALTERNATIVE TWO: INTEGRATION
Balance requires a dualism of this and that. A successfully balanced scale must have a reliable and distinct concept of what this and that is. It pushes a binary. Nothing wrong with binary. Love the 0101010 world that we have lived in. Frankly, our world is in transition and the while the binary has function and time and place – where we are heading the quantum – does not.
The work life balance game requires the binary so that you can successfully play it through adding and subtracting – a reallocation of a limited resource. Paying Peter by stealing from Paul. It is a deficit and scarcity game. No matter how silky and well-intended words used for reading rules of game are – these rules are full of limitation and constraint. They are not rules of an expansion and growth game.
Now integration has got those kind of rules. I wont go into my mathematical breakdown of integration here (maybe some day I will write out how the rules of integration ie. power rule, sum rule, different rule, and product rule all play out in the inter/intra-relation). Instead will try and show the trap in the current paradigm and the functions of integration as it pertains to the work life conflict.
First challenge. Get out of the trap. Who said that work and play had to be exclusive. If I told you to play all day long, bring whomever you want with you, where you wanted to be, and you could play whatever games you wanted …. Would you even care about balancing that out? NO. No, you wouldn’t.
I hear the objections – but I can’t do whatever I want I have bills to pay. I hear you and I also see that THAT objection arises out of the very mindset that has you imprisoned, burned out and exhausted. You will never reach harmony or integration in that binary mindset.
Work can be play …. And worthwhile play can take work. If you can find where your play intersects other people you can find a way to turn your play into commerce.
I hear the next objection – well not everyone can go around playing someone has to do the hard work. First off no one said that hard work was off the table. Pick that back up. Also, how about getting back into your lane and let every one else play the game their way. You have zero idea of how diverse what people consider to be platy and how wide a range of social functions that entails. I know folk who clean for pleasure and I know folks who argue for pleasure – two of my least favourite things in the world to do.
A few more things about integration. I now realize that there is so much more to expand on when it comes to this topic. When we all are integrating individually it integrates collectively and the growth is amplified.
Integration results from a multiplying function whereas balance results from a function of addition and subtraction. How do I mean that lets look at three, although there are certainly others.
Integration multiplies by constant. What you do continually you improve at. The more you improve the greater capacity you have to produce opportunity to continue what you do. People use the phrase insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. If Einstein did say this he was wrong or not entirely right – it dismisses the accumulated cause to an observable accelerated effect. I may lower the temperature in a room with a bucket of water by a degree each day. From 100 down to 20. You can ask me each day what are you doing nothing is changing. Except on the 68th day something will change. IF it wasn’t for the degrees I lowered the temperature before – the was an accumulated cause (the degrees between 100 and 32) accelerated an observable effect (at the freezing point).
Integration multiplies by parts. When you combine parts you provide possibility. Combining parts generates new products. There are possibilities that are not yet created or examined. The practical example here is take any two functions of your daily life and combine them. Do that repeatedly as often as you are able and discover exactly how time/space deficient you really aren’t AND You may discover an entirely new way to approach those functions.
Or even better if you even need those functions to begin with.
Integration multiplies by substitution. What you won’t do someone else can do. If you hate doing it let someone else do it. There is something that they hate doing that you like to do. Work out of your strengths and not your opportunities. Delegate, direct, hire, contract. You will spend less energy and money giving the work to someone else than you will wasting your energy and money dragging yourself through it or sinking the cost of it through distractions and procrastination.
Hopefully, if you’ve made it to the end of this article your old paradigm of work life balance is being challenged and you are either irritated and defensive or you are curious and wanting explore these ideas further.
However you find yourself I encourage you to share your objections, thoughts, or questions and engage in a productive dialogue with other subscribers.
