Work-Life Balance
An Enduring Question as Solidago Turns Three
As the Solidago Institute approaches its third anniversary, one question seems to endure more than any other: how can we better attain work-life balance?
This question regularly pops up in both private conversations and large group workshops, and it’s always described as something that feels perpetually out of reach. At the heart of this question, I hear a yearning of the soul.
The desire for more work-life balance is grounded in resentment that one’s work isn’t allowing them to fully live. The pressures of deadlines and goals feel so significant that the ability to enjoy life feels elusive. When this desire for ‘work-life balance’ is articulated, it’s always the result of one’s days being filled with too much work—never too much ‘life.’
It would seem then that the only solution for achieving work-life balance is to work less and live more. But there is little practical application for how you can actually do this. If you’re self-employed, then you can determine the length of your workday and how many projects you take on. But if you work on a team, or in any organizational setting, the “work less and live more” directive isn’t particularly helpful.
DOING WORK THAT HAS MEANING
As someone who is a recovering “workaholic” (a metaphor we’ll examine more fully some other time), I believe that the impulse to protect one’s life from being dominated by too much work is a healthy one. But I believe we need to stop imagining work and life as competing forces. If ‘work-life’ balance were a basketball game that was entering the fourth quarter (or ‘Q4’), for most people I know, work is winning, and it’s not close. It’s a blowout.
If you need a visual for this, Google “Alonzo Mourning GIF” and you’ll see his look of exasperation as the Miami Heat got blown out in the first game of the 2006-07 season against the Chicago Bulls. The Heat, who had just received their championship rings earlier that night, ended up getting beat 108-66. In this metaphor, the Chicago Bulls are ‘work,’ and the Miami Heat are ‘life.’ Are you still with me?
My point here is that we’re almost always losing in the quest for ‘work-life’ balance.
I believe that an actual solution exists when we stop treating work and life as competing forces, and we try to inject more life into our work. For me, this looks like doing work that has meaning and is grounded in values.
Imagine you have an opportunity this coming week as to decide how you want to spend your Friday. For this exercise, you have two options: you can leave work at noon, but you have to spend your workday alongside people who pressure you to do work that is at odds with your values—or—you could work a full 8-hour day alongside people who share your values and have a desire to create more creative and meaningful work—which would you choose?
I can share from personal experience that I have worked 20-hour jobs that have left me infinitely more spiritually and literally exhausted than jobs where I would regularly work 50+ hours doing meaningful work.
THE QUEST TO FIND MEANING
Whenever I begin a training, there is a part of me that feels like I have driven a sort of Trojan horse into a workplace. While the Solidago Institute offers trainings and workshops that help organizations have “healthier work culture,” I find myself far more interested in the lives of the people who make up these workplaces.
The aim of every Solidago program is not just to provide ‘good medicine’ that can enrich one’s workplace—we want our programs to enrich people’s lives, and in turn, their communities.
As we celebrate three years of facilitating these sorts of programs, it has become increasingly evident that helping people navigate the question of ‘work-life balance’ has been essentially baked into our mission. Our mission is to help people lead lives, create workplaces, and build communities grounded in justice and well-being. Our work is oriented towards justice and well-being, but it’s in the messy interplay of life, work, and community that our work takes root.
A CLOSING NOTE IN MEMORY OF ANNIE DILLARD
This past month we shared reflections about three individuals who recently passed away whose work has left an indelible mark on the Solidago Institute. These pieces reflected on the dreamer Dolly Parton, the farmer Wendell Berry, and the revolutionary Gloria Steinem.
In the days following this 3-part Labor Day series, yet another intellectual hero of the Solidago Institute passed away: Annie Dillard, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer whose deep attention to the natural world posed profound questions about wonder, faith, and what it means to be alive.
In her 1990 book, The Writing Life, Annie Dillard reminded us that: “How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.”
As the Solidago Institute reflects on where we’ve gone over the past three years, I’d invite you to reflect on a similar idea that underscores the importance of having meaningful work: How we spend our workdays is how we spend our lives.
