Posted in Misc., Perspectives | Posted on 07-10-2009
Tags: philosophy, Strategies, work
[Read Time (Total): 3 minutes]
I’m a very busy person and if you are too, you’ve probably been told to take it easy every now and then. Yesterday talking with a friend about my about 80 hours or so of work per week, he expressed his concern about whether or not it’s a balanced lifestyle.
This is definitely the reaction I would expect coming from someone who cares about me but this particular time it struck me for the first time as an odd thing to say.
This quasi-reflective post is of a nature I’ll not often publish on BrainChocolate but it’s extremely relevant to a very important post I published called “Productivity Tips and Free Time Management: How to Create a System That Works for You.” In it, I walk step by step through starting the process of organizing your entire life by massively reducing stress, increasing productivity by thousands of times, and living the kind of life you want. A big promise for sure but you can evaluate it once you read it.
Anyway, the concept of “work” is one that can be defined in infinite ways but common to the way most people use it, work is something you don’t want to do and contributes in some significant way to stress and negative emotions. Hence the natural concern about imbalance upon hearing someone is working 80 hours per week. Overwhelmingly people believe that you get a job–and that’s your work–then you have hobbies outside of your job–that’s play, not work. The more you work, the less you play.
There are a million different ideas about work v. play that come out of challenging this way of thinking but here’s the main point I’m getting at: thinking of life as “balance” means that you take for granted the idea that you should/have to put up with a lot of stuff you don’t want to do as a matter of necessity while incorporating things you enjoy to counteract these things you don’t like. The preceding (bolded) view is at the core of American culture and it’s something worth escaping, to say the least.
There’s no legal, natural, cultural, or societal law that says that you have to spend a significant amount of your time on things you don’t actively enjoy doing–it’s just that everyone does it so it seems most natural. So, as a preface to my next post: DON’T DO IT. Don’t accept the idea that you have to spend any time at all doing anything you genuinely don’t want to do. None.
There are all kinds of arguments as to why this could be a bad philosophy to adopt: it could lead to extreme selfishness; it’s unrealistic and you’ll just be disappointed; it minimizes the suffering of those who are structurally disadvantaged and is an elitist mindset–the list goes on. All these can certainly be extracted from this way of looking at the world, but just because they can doesn’t mean they should be.
Don’t be selfish. Don’t build it up as some dogmatic, idealistic expectation. Don’t use it to inform your understanding of the socio-economic ladder. This idea, and many like it, are meant as tools of utility–tools to be used solely for their positive and productive ends. Ignore the stupid shit that could be taken from it–”could” is not productive and it doesn’t help anyone.
So stop thinking of life in terms of “work” and “play” and start thinking of it in terms of “play” and “play” and you’ll be pretty well prepared for this next post…and life in general.
