#64: Reject work/life balance!
We're constantly encouraged to strive for work/life balance. But it's a horrible, victim-blaming, damaging metaphor, and it tricks us into thinking we should take on more than we're able to cope with. And, besides, who wants to spend their entire career balancing stuff?! Your Imperfectionist friend is here with some truth bombs about how you ought to be thinking about how to manage all that stuff you have going on, and how you can view it all in a way that makes it easier to find and enforce healthy boundaries.
To find the 'Identify your core values' exercise and the 'Wheel of life' exercise mentioned in the episode, go to The Academic Imperfectionist Resources page.
Episode transcript:
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hi, friends. Recently, I’ve been receiving quite a few lovely emails from some of you, with great suggestions for future podcast episodes, and nice words about the podcast. Thank you, I love hearing from you, and I’ll get around to replying personally very soon! I’m thanking you here, publicly, in the interim because … well, this is something I want to get around to doing, and I’m a bit stressed by the fact that I haven’t done it yet. It’s not just emails I’m behind with, of course (although I am always behind with emails). It’s lots of other things too. Deadlines left, right, and centre. Stuff I haven’t yet done for my kids. That huge box of expensive cat wall furniture that I still haven’t attached to the wall, and which I won’t get around to attaching to the wall until I work out how I can best attach it to that particular type of wall without it falling off as soon as one of my cats jumps onto it. The sink in my bathroom that has been blocked for well over a year. Expenses that I haven’t claimed. Friends I need to catch up with. Fitting all this stuff in around the things I get paid to do. And all the while, of course, I’m telling myself that I’m doing it all wrong, that I’m a bad person because I’m behind on things, that everyone thinks I’m incompetent, that everyone else is doing a better job of managing stuff like this, and all the rest of it. I know you know what i mean. That’s why you listen to this podcast, isn’t it? You want help with getting things done more effectively and feeling better about what you’re doing. You want help with striking the right balance between all the things you ought to be doing. You want to ensure you’re giving each thing as much time and energy as it warrants, and no more, because that would mean not giving other things enough time and energy.
Ugh. ‘The right balance’. I hate that expression. ‘Work-life balance’. Just shut up. What do I have against it? It’s that term, ‘balance’. When we try to balance something, like when you try to balance a set of old-fashioned weighing scales by putting the same amount of stuff on each side, or when you try to carry a book on your head, or when you try to ride a bike or (more exotically) walk a tightrope, you have to get everything in exactly the right place and keep it there, otherwise it all comes crashing down. Striking a balance requires finding that one elusive position that will enable you to hold everything up, indefinitely, impressively, and sometimes in apparent defiance of the laws of physics. There’s only one position that will enable you to do that - a fraction of a gram too much to the left or to the right or too far forward or back, and you won’t be able to hold it all up. And, conversely, if you find everything falling down around you, then that’s your evidence that you haven’t struck a balance. That you’ve failed. You’re not skilful enough. You’re giving too much effort to the wrong things and not enough to the right things. You need to try harder to find the sweet spot.
So, yeah. As you can probably guess, my main gripe with the term ‘work/life balance’ is that it has victim-blaming baked into it. It implies that, no matter how much life throws at you, there’s a sweet spot that would enable you to hold everything up. You just need to find it. And so, if you’re struggling to keep up with all your various commitments, that’s because there’s something wrong with you. You’ve failed to find the sweet spot. You’re not skilful enough. You’re like a child falling off a bicycle and scraping their knee because they haven’t learnt how to do bikes yet. And, you know, children - even young ones - do learn to ride bicycles. So, why can’t you do the adult equivalent, and manage to fulfil your obligations without ballsing something up?
Now, there’s no good reason that I can see to use the ‘balance’ metaphor when we think about trying to keep up with all the things we have going on in our lives. What if keeping up isn’t about balance at all, but about - I don’t know - trying to fit water in a glass? Because that changes everything. If trying to keep up with your commitments is like that, then there comes a point when you can’t fit any more water in the glass. If you try, the water is just going to run down the sides. That’s just how it works. There’s no question of your needing to be a bit more skilful about how you fit the water into the glass. There’s no question of ‘fill the glass smarter, not harder’. If the glass is overflowing, it’s not because you’re filling the glass wrong. It’s just too full. The glass has this capacity, and no more. If the glass is already full and you don’t want it to overflow, you need to stop trying to put more water in it. There’s no way around that.
If it’s about balance, on the other hand, then there’s no limit to how much stuff you can take on. You can take on more and more and more, and if you find yourself struggling to cope then you need to work harder to get the balance right. The struggle happens not because of the people who keep loading you up with more and more stuff, but because of your inability to keep it all in balance. I mean, I thought you were a capable adult? And yet here you are, whining like a child who doesn’t want the stabilisers taken off their bike. At least, that’s the way this nasty metaphor encourages us to think of ourselves and our relationship to the demands that others make of us.
I suspect that the influence of the balance metaphor is behind the reluctance that a lot of you feel to say no to things. Saying, ‘I can’t cope with any more’ under these circumstances can feel like saying ‘I’m not as skilled as I should be at managing my life’, rather than ‘I’m already at max capacity’. It seems to be easier for people who are well-established in their careers to say no than for early-career people. Established people are less likely to have anxiety about whether people will interpret their ‘no’ as incompetence, or perhaps they just have enough job security not to care. Whereas early-career people - and I speak from experience here, both my own and those of others I’ve spoken to - early-career people are often tempted to say yes to things, even when they can’t see how they can possibly fit it all in, because they want to show how skilled and competent they are. They think: I’ll take on this new commitment, and work out later how I can keep up with everything. This makes the balance metaphor especially dangerous to people who are just starting out.
Ok, so that’s a bit sinister about that metaphor. But on the plus side, perhaps we can make things better by changing the metaphor. Suppose you stop thinking of all your various commitments in terms of a big balancing act, and start thinking of them along the lines of the glass of water I mentioned earlier. If all your time is accounted for - and bear in mind that you need to factor in time to rest and recharge here too - then your glass is full. So, if someone asks you to take something else on, then they’re asking you to accept more water into your already-full glass. There’s no question here about what your answer should be. There’s no ‘maybe if I can just move these water molecules around a bit to make room for this extra water’. You can move stuff around as much as you like, but you still have a full glass. The only way you can make room is to remove some water that’s already in the glass; in other words, to give up something that you’re already involved with. And that’s a much clearer, more sensible approach. If you’re asked to take something else on and you already have a full glass, then ask yourself which of your existing projects or commitments you’re willing to give up in order to make room for this new thing. If you’re not willing to give anything up, then your answer’s ‘no, i can’t take on anything else at the moment’, no matter how uncomfortable that might be.
Ok, so, try replacing the balance metaphor with the glass of water metaphor and see how you get on. Great. Hope that helps. However. I think the effects of the balance metaphor are more far reaching than this. It’s not merely that balance is the default metaphor that’s used to describe the way we relate to the various projects we have going on. It’s that a lot of the advice that’s offered to us about how to manage everything without burning out is structured around this metaphor. We’re encouraged to strive for balance. We’re not encouraged to reject the metaphor. Now, a lot of the advice out there is well-intentioned. If you search for articles on work/life balance you can find plenty of stuff about saying no to things and not taking on too much. But given that the balance metaphor encourages us to shift our focus away from how much we’re doing and look instead at how we’re doing it, I worry that this ‘you can say no to stuff’ idea might be lost on a lot of you. Your inner critics never miss an opportunity to remind you that it’s your fault that you can’t cope, after all. And saying no is uncomfortable for a lot of you - especially if you’re early-career and competing for jobs against people who might be saying yes to the things that you’re saying no to. All this together is a perfect storm for burnout.
But anyway, even setting aside the worry that viewing our commitments in terms of a giant balancing act risks encouraging us to take on more and more, the balance metaphor is pretty disastrous. Not everything can be balanced, after all. There’s not always a sweet spot that would enable us to keep everything in perfect and harmonious alignment, if only we could find it. Balancing on a child’s bicycle, or on a tightrope, isn’t going to be possible if you’re carrying an elephant. There’s no sweet spot to be found in those circumstances, only a crushed bike or a snapped tightrope.
But here’s what I think is the worst thing about the balance metaphor. Balance is an inherently unstable state. Something is stable when - and I’m paraphrasing here from the online Merriam-Webster dictionary - disturbing it will cause it to return to its original condition. So, think of a marble in the bottom of a bowl. You can disturb the marble by pushing it up the sides of the bowl, but as soon as you let go it’s going to roll back down to the bottom again. The marble in the bottom of the bowl is in a stable state. Now, what if you were to flip the bowl over and balance the marble on the upturned bottom of the bowl? (Let’s suppose that the bowl is completely curved, so it doesn’t have a flat bottom.) If you do that, then it’s going to be very difficult to keep the marble where it is. The slightest disturbance - a breeze from an open window, someone shutting a door in the next room, a car driving along the street outside - is going to cause the marble to roll off the bowl. If you want to keep it balanced on the bowl, you’re going to have to direct a lot of energy and attention to watching it and correcting its position. It’s the opposite of stable. It’s precarious. Balance is precarious. So, why do we think of work/life balance as a good thing? This is bullshit. It’s a precarious state. Don’t settle for precarity. Aim for stability.
What would aiming for stability look like? Well - and, look, I’m sorry for all the metaphors that are buzzing around in this episode - let’s go back to the marble in the bottom of the bowl. Disturbing its position causes it to return to where it was. Gravity takes care of that, along with the shapes of the marble and the bowl. In your case, though, you can’t rely on gravity to keep things in check- you’re going to need to help things along a bit to ensure you keep returning to your original, stable position. First, you need to work out what life looks like, for you, when you’re at max capacity. One way to think of that is to ask what life looks like when you’re able to devote the right amount of time and energy to the things you care most about, and when redirecting time or energy elsewhere is going to result in neglecting more important things. I have a couple of exercises that can help you with this: there’s the ‘Identify your core values’ exercise and the ‘Wheel of life’ exercise that you can find on the Resources page of the Academic Imperfectionist website - I’ll put a link to that page in the episode notes. Think of that vision of your life as a stable state; the one you need to keep returning to whenever you’re disturbed. Now, it could be that you’re not currently at max capacity, in which case you have time and energy to spare, and you can afford to take on new things. But, taking on anything else when you’re at max capacity disturbs the original state. It moves the marble up the side of the bowl. And when that happens - which might be the result of extra demands, a crisis to deal with, or whatever - something has to happen to restore the original state. That’s going to mean saying no, or if you can’t say no, giving up or dialling back on some existing commitment or project, either temporarily or permanently. Keep in mind that the original state is the one you need to return to. You can’t just take on more and more - that’s just moving the marble up the side of the bowl, where it’s not allowed to stay. You need to prioritise returning to that state. That’s stability. In essence, it’s having boundaries, knowing where they are, and being serious about policing them. It’s not ‘balance’. Reject that. You deserve better. Laters, imperfectionists.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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