Everything, all of this, and all that you do, twenty-twenty for what?
On work-life balance, who it’s for, and why we want it
1. Preamble, or The Inequality Factory
It likely won’t shock anyone to hear that I don’t really buy the idea of ‘work-life balance’. I don’t buy it because it implies, disingenuously, that work is somehow separate from life—that the way you spend your time for forty hours a week or more is somehow distinct from the remaining one hundred and twenty-eight hours spent doing whatever else.
When we talk about the great figures of the past, the auteurs, the physicists, and the philanthropists, we talk about their lives’ work. We recognise, in all our heroes and histories, that creating a life’s work requires spending one’s life, to some extent or another, working. A person’s impact will always, to one degree or another, be proportionate to their efforts. If you want to make a greater impact in your lifetime, you should always begin by making a greater effort.
Modern movements to shorten the working week, then, have little to do with any inherent diminishing returns associated with working long hours. Instead, they have everything to do with the reality that some significant number of white-collar workers do not have forty hours’ worth of meaningful work each week to do. Most people have a passing familiarity with David Graeber’s 2018 book Bullshit Jobs, and while the pervasiveness of useless jobs is contested, this sort of work, or just as importantly the perception of it, is very real. Most interesting to my thesis, here, is this: calls for shorter work weeks often come from a feeling of being under- rather than over-worked, useless rather than useful.
Let’s consider another key driver of ‘work-life balance’: the ubiquity of the mobile phone. The establishment of constant availability, beginning in the mid-90s, gave all our worst bosses the ability to Touch Base at any time. This blurring of the work-life divide is perhaps the core problem, and one rooted in a loss of our agency as individuals—an indictment on bad structures and cultures of specific organisations, rather than on the concept of working forty-odd hours every calendar week.
Work-life balance is about workplace boundaries, not workload volume.
Even if you believe that the four-day work week could maintain five-day office worker productivity in the long run, you have to concede this can never be the case for the likes of truck drivers, construction workers, or nurses. While you can probably send five days’ worth of emails in four days, you cannot drive five days’ distance, lay five days’ bricks, or treat five days’ emergency ward patients. I write this newsletter on-site and surrounded by seasonal-working technicians paid by the hour, and I’m telling you: the four-day work week is at best a bourgeoise confabulation, and at worst an inequality factory.
2. Amble, or A Reflection on Duty
The reason for the extended preamble above is to make clear that the ability to work less is a function of privilege, and not a moral good. Even in a hypothetical Australia underpinned by a generous Universal Basic Income, it would still be easy to argue that we have a responsibility to undertake at least a full-time equivalent workload for globally focused charity.
In twenty-twenty four, I explicitly want to work less. This has me feeling deeply conflicted. Our theme this year, then, helpfully delivered by Calvin—named for John Calvin, the Reformed Christian father of the protestant work ethic, a memetic trait which I have very much inherited—from Calvin & Hobbes, is a question like a mantra: Everything, all of this, and all that you do, twenty-twenty for what?
Five hundred and fifteen years after John Calvin’s birth, in the Lord’s year of twenty-twenty four, he has returned, Benjamin Button–style, in the sketched outline of a young and precocious boy, to ask us: what are our good reasons to work? What are our good reasons to do anything? How do we separate out the eudaemonia and the hedonism of our day-to-day and determine what a good life, a good life’s work, actually is?
To work less in twenty-twenty four will require posing to myself Calvin’s question again and again and again. I write this essay to at least partially explore why this is such an important question to ask, and such a difficult one to answer.
People who know me well will know that I have tried and failed in the past, many times and for extended periods, to work less. I attribute this failure, by and large, to the simple fact that I am lucky enough to enjoy working. I enjoy making things—be they works of literature, pieces of software, or non-profit organisations. On top of this, I like financial security. I also feel accountable to a deep-seated moral drive within myself: that the greatest function of privilege is responsibility, and that failing this responsibility may well be tantamount to sin.
None of this is to say that a person is wrong to not enjoy their work, or indeed to not enjoy working. It is in fact very easy for unfulfilling work to destroy you, and there are many bad—or insufficient—reasons for endless, brutal toil. Money for money’s sake, or even money for charity’s sake is an unsatisfactory motivator for many people. Although I am a pledge member of Giving What We Can, and this does imbue every part of my work with at least some meaning, I do not necessarily think that the earn-to-give argument is sufficient justification for all people and all career paths. It might be necessary, but it is not sufficient. And even in the case that you do fully believe in maximising your impact or income at all costs, you can still only work to your physical and mental limits for so long before your soul begins to feel it. It is best not to push those limits too hard.
And so, with this intention to slow down set, I head into twenty-twenty four. I know there are and will be tradeoffs. I look forward to making them, and I hope to make them well. And of course we’ll see what weird and huge thing I end up saying yes to between now and the end of the year—because as much as I think I’d like to slow down, this world is too wonderful to say no to all that often.
In every moment a bounty,
Jonathan O’Brien