Is Life Balance Unnecessary If You Love Your Work?

In a post titled “The Suck Factor of Life Balance,” blogger Danielle LaPorte describes the concept of life balance as boring, like small talk and low-fat cheese. As if those analogies weren’t derogatory enough, she also compares it to original sin, arguing that it creates guilt by encouraging us to hold ourselves to an impossible standard. Life balance, she says, is supposed to be stress-reducing, but it’s actually stress-inducing.

Danielle agrees that stress is a real problem, but she argues that the remedy for stress isn’t balance. It’s passion.

Why Do Some People Dislike Life Balance?

Before I examine whether passion can replace life balance, I want to ask why some people dislike this seemingly innocuous concept.

I suspect that some people object to life balance because they believe it implies that each area of their lives should get an equal share of their time and energy. But I don’t think that’s what life balance really means. If you spend eight hours at work, does that mean you need to spend eight hours brushing your teeth? Obviously not. The goal shouldn’t be equal time, but enough time. Depending on how fast you floss, spending fifteen minutes a day on oral hygiene might constitute balance.

People also criticize life balance because they say it’s too constricting to try to achieve a perfectly balanced life every day–apportioning precisely 8 hours to your day job, a hour to your art, and 35 minutes reading a bedtime story to your kids.

I agree that it’s unnecessarily rigid to demand life balance within each twenty-four hour period. As Clay Collins has written:

Just as balanced eating doesn’t require that every meal contain all major food groups, balanced living does not require that every day include a “proper” amount of sleep, social time, spiritual time, work, and play. What’s important is that we get what we need from life, when we need it. What’s important is that we achieve balance over the course of weeks, months, years, or even a lifetime.

Danielle LaPorte seems to be getting at the same point when she writes that “It’s about an overall proportion in your life, not perfection.” (Italics hers.)

In her blog post, Danielle describes her life as wildly unbalanced on a day-to-day basis. Yet her life doesn’t seem quite so unbalanced if you look at it over a period of weeks rather than days.

“I ‘work’ on holidays,” she writes, but “Last Monday I stayed in bed and read all day.”

Again, she writes, “I can eat cereal every day for a week, wearing the same clothes, never leaving the house because I want to finish a book.” But on the other hand, “I like last minute trips out of town and not answering email for days.”

I don’t think it’s a problem if some of your days are short on rest, exercise, or social interaction. Sometimes your life will necessarily remain out of balance for weeks or even months–when you’re finishing a dissertation, for example, or starting a business, or when your baby is teething.

But at some point, you need to get the things you’ve been missing, or your health and happiness will suffer. And if you’ve just worked non-stop on a work-related project for a month, you need more than a single weekend of hiking and reading mindless novels to recuperate.

Why It Isn’t Enough to Do What You Love

One thing that Danielle and Clay don’t talk about is the fact that certain activities are more likely to be short-changed than others. Most of us spend a lot of our time on three activities: working, driving, and imbibing passive entertainment from a series of screens. Each year, the average American spends over 100 hours commuting to work, and 1,812 hours watching TV, but only 80 hours on vacation. (Obviously, there’s some overlap between those last two activities.)

At the other end of the spectrum, the activities that are most often short-changed are exercise, sleep, food preparation, and uninterrupted time with family and friends. The predictable results include obesity, chronic health problems, and social isolation.

Just because you enjoy your work doesn’t mean you don’t need physical activity, nor can work replace quality time with your family. As Corbett Barr points out:

There are plenty of great things in life that are enjoyable in moderate doses but dangerous when addicted to. Sex, drugs, adrenaline-fueled sports, watching TV, exercise and the Internet all come to mind. Some are dangerous to your health, others are dangerous to your mental state, your finances or simply because they cause neglect in other important areas of life.

Work is no different. If you love what you do, it’s easy to become consumed by it. If you let it go too far, you’ll start to neglect other things.

The book Three Cups of Tea is the inspiring story of one man’s heroic effort to build schools in Pakistan and Afganistan. It’s also a cautionary tale about the harmful effects of pursuing a passion to the exclusion of everything else.

After Greg Mortenson started a non-profit organization, he adopted a punishing schedule, routinely getting up at 3:00 a.m. so that he could phone his contacts in Pakistan. He stopped mountaineering and gained a lot of weight. He also reportedly isolated himself from other members of his organization and refused to delegate.

In the book, Greg’s wife is quoted as saying that “I told Greg I love how passionate he is about his work. But I told him he had a duty to his family, too. He needed to get more sleep, get some exercise, and get enough time to have a life with us.”

That’s good advice for all of us–whether we’re just doing trying to make a living, or shuttling between Montana and Northwest Pakistan on a mission the change the world.