January 27, 2019

Why I Don't Believe in "Work-Life Balance"

(Or, A Tribute to Mary Oliver's Grasshopper)

            Because it's a false dichotomy.  And like most such dichotomies, it obscures, submerges, and silences more of the truth about lived experience than it reveals.  That's what makes it false. 

                                                                                                                                     

            But I find the "work-life balance" dichotomy especially pernicious.  These days, its untruthfulness strikes me most squarely when some well-meaning friend or acquaintance asks me how many hours I "work" per week.  It's usually someone who knows I have both small children and a small-town law practice, and often comes in a setting where one or more of my children are clamoring (or clambering) for my attention. I've taken to responding, at least initially, with a warm chuckle and a question: "Do you mean the hours I work for monetary compensation, or the hours I work for some other kind of compensation?"  That usually elicits a chuckle in return, followed by some discussion of the challenges of "juggling" family with professional responsibilities. 

            My question, of course, is designed to shift the conversation out of the well-worn "work-life" rut, at least a little bit.  I hope to unsettle the idea, implicit in the question about "working hours," that the only work that really counts as work is work that a person performs in exchange for money.

            Like most people, I do many things every day that can feel a lot like work, but for which I receive no monetary compensation.  Are Brad and I not working when we run those seemingly endless loads of laundry and dishes, or when we change little people's diapers and brush little people's teeth?  Are we not working when we collaborate on the weekly grocery list, or when we make dinner and sit down to eat with the kids (two of whom still need a fair amount of assistance at meal times)?  Am I not working when, about twice per month, I make sure our household bills and financial accounts are in order?  What about all those hours I spent nursing my kids when they were infants, or pumping breastmilk?  Was that work?  What about when I mow the yard or clean the bathroom or feed the dogs and the chickens?  Am I not working then too?  Brad and I hope to put in a sizeable vegetable garden this spring, which translates into many hours of planning, planting, pruning, picking, and preserving.  Will that count as work?

            Or is that the "life" part?  In the uninterrogated version of "work-life balance," "work" is what a person does for money, and "life" is . . . well, everything else – ranging, I guess, from showering and making the beds all the way to keeping up a running or yoga practice and binge watching This Is Us (or, in my case, binge listening to audio books on my phone while I shower and make the beds).  "Life," in this frame, is supposed to encompass all of the daily and weekly tasks of maintaining a modern life (with the assistance of all our modern techie appliances, or a hired assistant) and everything we think should make our lives – or our kids' lives – pleasant, perhaps even meaningful.

            But is this construct useful?  Does it actually lead to a sense of a pleasing and meaningful life?  Or is it, as I suspect, a recipe for resentment, burn-out – or worse?

                                                                                                           

            The basic problem with a framework that sets "work" and "life" at odds with one another is that it ends up, ironically, devaluing both money-making endeavors and everything else.  On one side, it casts a drear shadow of death, or at least drudgery, over the activities by which we support ourselves financially, the category of things we uncritically call "work."  A literal reading of the dichotomy suggests that when we "work" to secure an income, we are setting life aside or putting life on pause.  If this is the case, then we're spending an inordinate amount of time in a quasi-dead mode – an average of 38.9 hours per week for Americans employed in all non-agricultural sectors, including so-called "part-time" workers, according to 2018 figures published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.⃰

                                   

            How dismal.  And what a betrayal of the value we Americans profess to put on work.  Is this what we have in mind when we tell our kids they should do well in school – so they can die a little death every day at those "good jobs" we tell them they need to get?  Is this what women have struggled for decades to achieve by making their way into the professions and the paid labor force – the privilege of devoting a significant share of their waking hours to something less than life?  Of course not.  But the work-life trope (which I suspect emerged in earlier decades as a way to grapple with the tension or dissonance that professional women felt as they assumed roles tailored by and for men) tends to bury a brighter view of work: as a source of dignity, an outlet for expression of our full humanity, or at least a partial means to that end.  

            This is not to deny that some level of drudgery is built in to every profession or job; "dignity" is not exactly the first word that comes to mind when I'm responding to an endless stream of emails, figuring out how to cure a title problem on a piece of real estate, or reviewing a municipal construction contract.  Nor is this to suggest that the mundane elements of work are the same in quality and quantity across different kinds of paid employment; the hotel housekeeping employee's set of potentially mind-numbing tasks looks very different from mine – and the distinction is probably important, though I will have to leave it for a later reflection.  But at least for me, a professional woman coming of age in the early 21st century, when I pan out and recall that as little as 100 years ago, I wouldn't have even been allowed to seek the credentials necessary to review a municipal construction contract, all of a sudden, the task doesn't seem quite so mundane.  Rather, it reflects a recognition that I have a set of personal and intellectual skills that are valuable and necessary in the world.  Can we excavate this view of work from beneath the bleak work-life landscape?

            And what about the other side of the ledger?  The other key downside of the work-versus-life paradigm is that it puts extraordinary pressure on the "life" side of the equation to compensate for the daily death that it takes to "earn a living" (another phrase rife with irony in this discussion).  If "life" is what we're supposed to get back in exchange for sacrificing ourselves at our paid jobs, then the work-life balance construct herds us toward a narrower, shallower concept of "life" as relief or escape from . . . from what?  Work, of course.  It thus encourages a creeping sense of entitlement to time and activities or experiences that feel distinctly un-work-like.  It thereby sows seeds of resentment about time we may need to spend cleaning out the garage, packing a lunch, or balancing the checkbook.  In other words, when we view work and life in opposition to each other, we end up sort of unconsciously expecting life to supply us with a certain kind of leisure – a mindless, unintentional sort, untethered from a sense of purpose or any kind of responsibility.  And this sets us up for disappointment if we don't feel we're getting enough of that kind of leisure to compensate for all those "working hours." 

            Now, don't get me wrong.  I'm not saying there's anything wrong with leisure per se.  It is leisure, after all, that gave us the Mona Lisa, Hamlet, and the Ninth Symphony.  It was because they each had a measure of leisure that Newton could work out his laws of motion, Ben Franklin could fiddle with his kite to begin understanding electricity, and Einstein could conclude that e=mc².  It was the lack of leisure, and the lack of a room of her own, that took the life of Judith Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf's imagined sister to William, who, by the accident of being born female, was prevented from expressing her great literary talent.  And it was certainly leisure that gave Mary Oliver, who died earlier this month at the age of 83, her now-famous encounter with that little grasshopper – the one whom the poet observed in minute detail while "idle and blessed" on a "stroll through the fields," the one who helped channel the question that beckons to us all in "The Summer Day":

                        Tell me, what is it you plan to do

                        with your one wild and precious life?

(Read the full poem in a collection available on the Library of Congress website, here: https://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/133.html.)

            Indeed.  "What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"  That is the question.

            And that is why I don't believe in work-life balance.  When work is death and life is merely a series of brief escapes from that death – escapes that one deserves because "I earned it" – little if any terrain is left over for cultivating a sense of purpose or calling, a sense of wonder and curiosity, a sense of gratitude and abundance in every part of our lives, whether paid or unpaid.  The work-life lens blinds us to the magic that is present in the seemingly mundane, the dignity in what often feels like drudgery.  But if we train ourselves to tune in and pay attention in all of our endeavors, instead of mentally or emotionally checking out when we're wearing one hat versus another, we stand to gain a sense of a coherent, animating purpose for our whole lives, leading us to make more of the brief years we're given.   

                                                           

            I am holding a little grasshopper now.  Her name is Madeline, and she's still in her pajamas.  She and her sister just woke up, and she wants me to hold her on my "wap" for a while.  Her baby brother is calling from his crib.  In a few minutes, they'll all need breakfast.  The dogs will need to go out, the dishes in the dishwasher will need to be put away, and the sheets will need to be stripped from the beds and washed, along with the towels.  It is the weekend, after all.  And tomorrow, back at the office, I'll tend to my emails and make my way through the to-do list that is like a never-ending game of whack-a-mole at the county fair: one task crossed off, only to give rise three more.

            But right now I'm looking into this little grasshopper's soft brown eyes and wondering what they will see in this life, how much more they will see than what I have seen or will ever see.  I'm wondering whether I'm up to this task – of doing my part to create and sustain a world where she can bring her gifts into being and share them, whatever they are.  I know that sometimes I'll receive money compensation for doing my part; other times I won't.  And much of the time, I won't feel balanced at all.  But balance may be too high a price to pay for this "one wild and precious life."

⃰ See Current Population Survey Table 21: Persons at Work in Nonagricultural Industries by Class of Worker and Usual Full- or Part-time Status, as last modified Jan. 18, 2019, https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat21.htm, accessed Jan. 22, 2019.