What Work-Life Balance?
In the past few days, India’s National Board for Wildlife (NBWL) published minutes of a meeting where they decided to impose a levy of 2% of a portion of the cost of any infrastructure or developmental projects that fall within an environmentally protected zone. Environmentalists are furious because essentially what this decision does is make it possible for businesses to compensate for their destruction of the environment with money.
When I read this news, my first thought was that this (very large scale) work-life imbalance was disproportionately tipped in favour of work. The term ‘work-life balance’ has never actually made much sense to me. Whether in the case of the NBWL’s decision––which aims to balance out a profit-making enterprise with intricate ecosystems that support the lives of multiple non-human species — or on an individual level, where we think about how to distribute our time and energy equally between the two… I never understood how it is normal or even conceivable to compare work with the entirety of life.
Apparently, the initial term was ‘work-leisure balance’. It’s only in the latter half of the 20th century that the term morphed into work-life balance, brought to the forefront by the Women’s Liberation Movement that sought fair working conditions for women who were expected to pursue a career and maintain a household in equal measure. But the term was co-opted by the entire professional sphere and catapulted into popularity. When technology came into the picture, it blurred the lines between times for work and not-work some more. So ‘work-life balance’, which industry is exploiting so well, stepped in to help people navigate the two.
An accurate balancing measure should ideally start off with its two sides being level. But when I imagine a work-life scale it’s always imbalanced to one side by default. Because we do everything in relation to work and not vice-versa. We plan our holidays in relation to work, we decide when we eat or sleep or make love according to work schedules, we choose what to study based on what job we want, we pick out what to wear based on what job we have…
Even on a societal level, a good portion of our laws and regulations are made to facilitate work. How come in most countries, the first consideration for ease of lockdowns in the last years was always the necessity to resume economic activity? And if we consider travel, how come there were always separate rules made to accommodate the needs of business? From quarantine exemptions for short business trips within countries, to business being included as essential in some international travel. At any time, but especially in a health crisis, if it’s easier to cross borders for work than to meet someone you care about (and who is not institutionally recognised as family), then what balance are we talking about?
This is the important question for me, because it always comes down to language. We use ‘balance’ to sell an idea of harmony that is fundamentally flawed considering that the two things its equating can never really be at the same level. And somehow instead of recognising the impossibility of work matching up to life, we’re faced with the incongruence of life never really catching up to work.
But opposite to that general assumption, there’s one thing the pandemic has made clear to us — that things can change overnight. We’ve seen that business can shut down and the world won’t end. The world as we know it might, and maybe that’s not such a bad thing, but as human beings we are in the unique position of choosing how we live instead.
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References:
1. https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/projects-in-protected-zones-to-draw-2-surcharge-as-mitigation-measure-101629483846014.html
2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4079063/
3. https://www.kumanu.com/defining-work-life-balance-its-history-and-future/
4. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/work-life-balance
