Thoughts On Work

Never get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life.

— Dolly Parton

The phrase “work life balance” perfectly describes a popular view on work that many people hold, myself included. In this worldview, work is seen as an unpleasant part of one’s life whose only purpose is a means to a financial end. You go to work, you make your money, and with that money you pay the bills and put food on the table. The goal here is to escape the “rat race” of work altogether by making or saving enough money to retire young.

The funny thing about this view on work is that if you work 40 hours a week and sleep eight hours a night, work accounts for more than a third of your waking hours. For most people it’s more than that, either because they work more than 40 hours a week, have to commute to and from work, or any number of other reasons. Realistically, work and work-related items will easily comes out to more than half of your waking hours.

The goal is to retire early so that you get all of your waking hours back. The problem here is that you’ll still need to work if you retire at 35, whether you like that fact or not. Only vegetables can sit and stare at a wall all day every day, and after a week of not working you’ll come to the dreaded conclusion that even though you hated your life when you were working, you hate it even more now that you have nothing to do. If humans need to work, then working with the goal of an early retirement seems rather pointless. If your goal is to work on whatever you want to work on, then why aren’t you doing that right now? What makes you think you’ll suddenly know what you want to do after you retire when you’ve been doing what someone else wants you to do for the past decade?

Some people try to address the impending unpleasantness of work by seeking meaning in their relationships with their coworkers or the work itself. That’s where are the company values and missions statements come in, as well as non-profit and charity work. Sure, there’s nothing wrong with feeling great about what you do, but are you sure you’re actually helping? Or do you feel good because of the way the job was marketed? On top of that, the people who value meaningful work are often the easiest to exploit because they are willing to get paid less, or not at all, in order to have the opportunity for a more meaningful experience.

The “meaningful work” approach seems like a band-aid on top of the rat-race view on work. There are people out there who are doing meaningful work, but that’s not because they want to alleviate the anticipated grind and unpleasantness of their job. These people are actually embracing the grind and unpleasantness of what they’ve chosen instead of trying to find a way out of it.

On the spectrum from fully modular to entire integrated, the work-life balance view (a.k.a. the rat-race view) falls more towards the modular end of the spectrum. Work is for money, and money is for supporting my life outside of work where I find meaning and happiness. Work and life are kept separate because they serve different purposes and involve different people. For people who seek meaning in their job (which is everyone, to different degrees), their view on work and life become a bit more integrated. Their coworkers are part of their life and their work is important to them in some way, but for the most part, work and life are separate and are kept that way.

Side note: I’m curious what it looks like when you start moving farther down the integration spectrum to the point where work-life balance is no longer a legible concept. A good example might be a family-owned restaurant where many of the customers and employees are good friends and the kids and adults work in the restaurant together. In these sorts of situations, work and life are really one and the same. The parents don’t need to get off work at six to see their kids because their kids are at the restaurant, and the same people that the family works with are the people that the family serves / employs at the restaurant.

The benefits of a modular system are the re-usability and independence of the modules. The benefits of a modular approach to work and life are the same — companies can easily replace employees (re-usability) and employees can easily change jobs (independence). The downsides of this show up in the long run when people never really get to know the people they work with and companies have to keep burning money on new-hire onboarding, recruiting, and severance packages. Corporations are modular creations from the ground up, as evidenced by the fact that everyone from the new-hire to the CEO are replaceable by someone of similar qualification or ability. This modular quality is probably what is responsible for the ruthless efficiency of private corporations and the rat race mindset of the people who work for these corporations.

I think the rat-race mentality is fine to start out with, but I don’t think you can escape the rat race by retiring early or looking for meaning in your job. Both are dead ends that will leave you bored and aimless (retiring early) or susceptible to exploitation (looking for meaning). The rat-race model of work and life is overly simplistic and, as a result, cannot answer many of the important questions related to one’s work, but it’s the most accurate over-simplistic model there is. Instead of going all in on retiring early or finding meaning in your job, you’re better off trying to learn more about different philosophies on work and refining the rat-race model, whether that’s by working in a different country, talking to people with different views, etc.