What Is Work-Life Balance?

What is work-life balance?

What is work-life balance? Wikipedia defines it as the interface between work and personal life. Wikipedia is wrong. There is no such thing as work-life balance. Work is life. They are the same thing.

Yesterday, we had friends over for a dinner party. My wife and I cleaned the house (mostly she did), set a nice table, chopped vegetables, made sauces, cooked the salmon and side dishes, and served everything. After dinner, we cleared the table, my wife loaded the dishwasher (she is the world’s expert in efficient dishwasher loading), and after I went to bed, she cleaned the house. This morning, I emptied the dishwasher and put in another load. (I think I got about half the dishes in the dishwasher she did last night.) 

If my wife and I worked at a restaurant doing everything I just described, they would have paid us money, and we would have gotten a tip from the customers–in my case, nine percent. At the end of the shift, we might have complained about the job and how much we hated it. Some would say we needed a better work-life balance. 

How is what we did at home different than what hosts, cooks, busboys, servers, and dishwashers do for work? Nothing. They are the same thing. I often give general medical advice to friends or relatives. (I don’t give specific medical advice because that’s improper, but I tell them what home remedies to use and whether they should see their doctor.) I don’t consider advising my friends to be work, but I get paid money for giving similar advice at the office. If you pick up a friend at the airport, it’s no different than working for Uber and picking up a customer.

So, it’s work if you get money for it and not work if you don’t? That makes no sense. The only difference between cooking for friends and cooking for money is the benefit you get from one or the other. We decide that cooking dinner for friends is fun and working for a restaurant is not. Giving advice to a relative is good, but going to the office and doing the same is work and causes burnout. Uber for money is work, but picking up a friend isn’t? Ridiculous.

Tarzan said, “Only a fool performs any act without reason.” So, what are the reasons for working at a restaurant or doing the same thing for friends? Everything you do has upsides and downsides. Working at a restaurant gives you the benefit of money. We can spend that money on things we want. Hopefully, we also get some pleasure from providing a good experience for the restaurant’s patrons. The downsides are the effort we put in and the time we spend that we can’t spend doing something else. We didn’t get money from our friends, though they brought hummus, veggies, and wine. (I didn’t drink the wine, but the hummus was superb.) Other benefits of hosting the dinner were the pleasure of providing a good experience for our friends and our enjoyment of their company. Our time and effort were the same as if we had done it at a restaurant.

What we do in our personal lives is often identical to what we or others do at work. The only differences are the upsides of the activity. We decide that it’s work if an upside of the activity happens to be money. There are some downsides to working at a restaurant that don’t happen at home. I can choose the time of my dinner party, and they would make my schedule at a restaurant, but once I get there, the job is the same.

The point I’m making is this. Every activity has upsides and downsides. Think of them and decide what you want to do. Try to consider everything. I am leaving my medical practice in a few weeks. It’s a big deal because I’ve been a doctor for over thirty years. After I retire, I will still be active and productive, and I have many projects lined up, some for money and some for pleasure. I have decided that the upsides of practicing medicine no longer outweigh the downsides. Maybe someday I’ll decide that the upsides of hosting a dinner at my house no longer outweigh the downsides, and we’ll go out more. The money they pay you for your job is only one upside to that activity–the upside defines it as work. If the money and other positives outweigh the negatives, keep doing it. If not, then stop. Don’t consider what we call work to be any different than any other activity. Don’t try to improve your work-life balance. Work is life.