Over the last decade the quest for “work / life balance” — thought to be the antidote to our modern condition — has taken on mythic proportions, spawning an entire industry (books, seminars, treatises, etc) dedicated to discovering and maintaining the precise tipping point that allows us to feel like our lives are our own.
This quest, now an end in itself, saps a lot of our energy, focus and resources, which seriously defeats the purpose and can leave us feeling powerless and despondent when we either can’t get it right or can’t sustain it.
How is this at all productive?
The answer is simple: Wrong quest.
Let’s start with the notion of “balance,” which suggests to me an image of an old fashioned scale with two trays suspended at either end from a horizontal beam. For that beam to remain horizontal, we need an exact amount of this (work) on one side and an exact amount of that (life) on the other. Add more of this or take away some of that and… no more balance. This is an exacting experiment, requiring controlled, predictable and static conditions. Realistic for a lab maybe, but not for us in a time of ambiguity, complexity and all but certain change.
Prior to the Great Recession we had already entered an era of “extreme jobs,” requiring us to log an unprecedented number of working hours, resulting in sky high stress levels and great unhappiness. Since the Recession, we find ourselves in a time that insists fewer people do more with less. Combine that with increased family and personal responsibilities and we can see how easy it is for the artificial balance to get upended.
Say we are somehow able to strike a balance between the work tray and the life tray. What happens, then, when that lab environment changes? Basically, back to square one — the changed environment absolutely impacts and disrupts the balance. Again, exhausting, frustrating and ultimately stressful, as the quest for balance between the demands of work and the demands of what we simplistically call life, becomes an end in itself. Clearly, our “lab environment” – our economic reality, our changing social context — has changed profoundly, leaving us with imbalanced trays and the solution more elusive than ever.
So, perhaps the static, exactly even scale construct works in the lab but it really isn’t up to the job of accommodating and flexing to the exigencies of modern life or environmental volatility.
Time for a new quest.
Exit “balance.” Enter Dynamic Equilibrium. Even though balance and equilibrium are often used interchangeably, they’re not the same things at all. The motivation behind achieving balance is estimable but, because it connotes a quest for an arbitrary, rigid, two-dimensional fixed point, it is all but unreachable and certainly impossible to sustain in real time and in real life. DynamicEquilibrium, on the other hand, is…. dynamic, alive and by definition, always adaptive. And, while balance struggles to stay unchanged, dynamic equilibrium has change, growth and flexibility built in, allowing for the inevitable ebbs and flows of life and work.
We need to think of life/work more like a river, and less like a balancing act.For example, a stream is affected by the characteristics of its surroundings, the rocks, vegetation, incline, soil, fractures, rain and groundwater levels. The stream will “shift” to adapt to changes in any of these factors by eroding its banks and channel floor, deepening or widening its course. Over time, these changing factors and climate affect the stream as a living example of dynamic equilibrium.
In a sense, we all manage the landscapes of our lives in similar ways. When we have more work to do, we shift our energy to pick up the load. When family or personal demands increase, we shift our focus there and let work slide a little. When we reach the new equilibrium point, we readjust, but that new equilibrium point – now seen as dynamic – expects and adapts to change.
How can we incorporate this into our individual lives?
Even before trudging through the detritus of the recent Great Recession, our lives had become increasingly complicated and the struggle to maintain an even keel extremely challenging. We thought the quest for “balance” would set it right and give us the time and perspective we so desperately needed. But questing for absolute balance in this day and age is frustrating and in the end, simplistic and ineffective. If we’ve learned nothing else, we should have learned that life and work present unanticipated twists, turns and uncertainty.
By thinking in terms of dynamic equilibrium instead of balance, we free ourselves to imagine things differently and…individually. We see flexibility in place of the rigidity of a two-tray balance, a fixed combination that cannot withstand environmental change and real-life circumstances. Because, in reality, our personal and professional lives have their own curves and swerves and ups and downs. Conditions change and external elements impose their own stressors making the quest for a predetermined set point unrealistic, ineffective, frustrating and ultimately inadequate to the task.
A life in dynamic equilibrium, on the other hand, is a living, breathing entity with the flexibility to reorganize itself, to evolve and to adapt, all in the interest of conserving energy and resuming its steady state, if just for a time.
Once we release the quest for “balance,” where we fight against ourselves and the odds to maintain an arbitrary standard of this much life and that much work, and replace it with the highly functional goal of dynamic equilibrium, we find ourselves with so many more options. Life is definitely better with options.
So much more reasonable, flexible and happy making, don’t you think?