Making the most of leisure time and work is a delicate balancing act
I raised the concept briefly with two of the guys I work with before the weekend. That was the morning one of them had found his dirty shirts in the fridge at home, having been so tired the night before, he'd mistaken it for the washing machine. Which was no bad thing, because there's damn all in his fridge to be offended by incoming manky shirts and anyway, his washing machine leaks into the room below and he'd forgotten to put the bucket in that room to catch the overflow. He's worn out coping with recalcitrant technology that's unfixable because the builders hid every part liable to breakdown behind a slab of marble that weighs more than a 767.
The other colleague has just embarked on a keep-fit campaign, but didn't have the time to properly read the guide to building muscle groups before he got started. So, on his first visit to the gym, he did ten times the correct number of repetitions with each weight. The following morning, he had to ask a co-worker to comb his hair for him because he couldn't lift his arms high enough to reach it.
Understandably, given their depleted reserves, neither man had much to offer about work/life balance. It was a soft-and-fuzzy rumour they didn't like the look of. They are among the many harried, happy, healthy, productive and interesting people who have severe work/life imbalance. And whose work/life imbalance may be a positive, rather than a negative: instead of making the socially-approved division between work and life, they don't distinguish between the two. Even when the man with the marble slab retreats (understandably) from his home into Waterstones at the weekends, he ends up buying books related to work.
It has always been thus. Precious few of the great breakthroughs in art, war, science, politics or commerce were achieved by people whose lives were divided, like a sliced pan, into balanced segments.
Mendelssohn is arguably the only great composer who had anything approaching such a segmented positive life. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was as hooked on drugs as any modern crack-addict during the years in which she produced her best work. George Patton had such a passion for the battlefield that when he encountered a soldier walking around a hospital looking able-bodied although in fact suffering from shell-shock he smacked him in the face for malingering.
Even in the White House, some of the most beloved Presidents couldn't get their work/life balance right, as exposed by a magician, performing for the Lincoln family, who asked President Lincoln for a white handkerchief as a prop for a trick. The President of the United States couldn't produce a hanky of any kind. Clean or dirty, he was fresh out of them. Not a great example of work/life balance.
Except that Lincoln laughed at being caught out. Important, that. A sense of humour is a lot more important to personal health and happiness than rigorous balancing of work hours and leisure hours. As is native optimism. Optimists live up to 19% longer than pessimists, and there's no proof that this optimism is improved at all by this mythical work/life balance aspiration.
Even the figures who wrote the book on balance, serenity and equity, like Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine and Henry David Thoreau were all frauds, to a greater or lesser extent. They didn't have or want work/life balance. They were just pretending to cash in on a market.
Aurelius had slaves: easy for him to have deep thoughts. The Bishop of Hippo had a mistress who took care of his every need until he developed late-onset chastity, whereupon he gave her a P45 and fast-tracked himself to sainthood. Thoreau, likewise, had a mistress who mothered him. Every time she gave birth to one of his children, he stuffed the child into an orphanage because it might have distracted him from jotting down reflections about roughing it (which he wasn't) at Walden Pond.
I'm not promoting addiction, slavery, subservient mistresses, smacking the sick or child abandonment. (Although, historically, they've been great career moves.) The point is that health, happiness and productivity have damn all to do with work/life balance, whatever the hell constitutes work/life balance. The unquestioned bromide that working fewer hours would make us all happier ignores the large numbers who are so challenged by non-work time that only large doses of alcohol get them through the weekend.
To be over-worked is not the same as being stressed and endangered. Much greater stress and danger is provided by boredom than by pressure. People bored at work are three to five times more likely to develop cardiovascular disease, even more likely to develop neurological disorders and are absent for medical reasons much more often than non-bored colleagues. Swiss research even suggests that boredom on the job lowers the IQ of the worker. How is all that going to be solved by more flexible hours or expecting non-work life to compensate for boredom at work? Or, as the ads twittered last week, by making the workplace 'family-friendly'? Boredom is not solved by the work/life balance movement. Nor does work/life balance solve the problem of women who have to rush out the office door at five to collect the children from the child-minder. The solution to that problem is not to tinker with the workplace, but to tinker severely with the so-called partnership between the man and the woman involved.
Behind concepts like 'Work/Life Balance Day' is the notion that lads like Thomas Alva Edison, inventor of phones and lightbulbs and a million other useful items, was unbalanced to work eighteen hours a day, taking naps occasionally on a bench in the middle of bubbling test-tubes. This despite him living thirty years longer than average life expectancy at the time, making billions of dollars and having a long and happy marriage. Admittedly, as fathers go, he was somewhere between bad and awful. But it's extremely doubtful that getting him to knock off after a mere fourteen hours and go home would have improved his parenting skills. It might have worsened them. Adding time to a bad trait tends to make the bad trait more floridly manifest.
An interesting experiment a couple of years back required people to perform a task timed by a clock. This clock had its insides interfered with so it could run fast or slow. Workers performed much better and enjoyed it more when the clock was speeded up.
And that's the problem with Work/Life Balance Day. It promotes unproven moderation in all things while denigrating those who get their kicks from dawn starts and unforced overtime and who drive some of the most exciting, effective businesses (and non-profit organisations) around.
Real balance requires the designation of a special day for them. Celebrating Adrenalin-Freak Workaholic Achievers. It wouldn't even have to be a weekday.
They work weekends. Always.
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