Don't Believe the Gaslighting about Work-Life Balance

_{Photo by Chroki Chi on Unsplash}

Written by Jess Kyle

Billionaires are back on their bullshit in a major way (not that they ever really give it a rest). This time, they’re campaigning to try to gaslight us into thinking that if only we would situate our lives around grinding nonstop at work, one day we, too, could attain the kind of wealth they have.

I stumbled upon this article in Fortune the other day, and learned that—brace yourself for this shocking revelation—Jeff Bezos takes issue with the entire concept of work-life balance, which in 2018 he called “a debilitating phrase”. What a surprise: the guy who founded a company famous for its delivery drivers having to urinate in bottles while driving because they can’t take a bathroom break takes issue with people wanting to do anything except work. If you’d like to hear a handful of other billionaires chime in to richsplain to all of us how dumb we all are if we want to create lives outside of work, I invite you to go read it; but be careful! You’re gonna need oven mitts to handle takes this hot.

Folks, I’m going to tell you this because I care about you: Even if you work 80-hour weeks for the rest of your life, you probably won’t ever become a billionaire. This is especially true if you’re working for someone else, which the vast majority of Americans are.

How the maths are mathing 

To illustrate the load of horse shit they’re trying to sell us with an example, let’s take this 9-9-6 nonsense (another super hot topic among oligarchs), which prescribes working 9am to 9pm, six days per week. So, you’re working twelve hours a day. If you work in a physical office, which is increasingly likely since these same people are the ones forcing people to give up remote work, you’ve got a commute—let’s be generous here and say that your commute is only 30 minutes one way (for a great many folks, it’s much longer than that). Driving to and from work, that’s an additional hour.

The average adult needs between 7-8 hours of sleep per night, and (maybe even more importantly) to wake up and go to bed at roughly the same time every day. If you’re following this edict, which is highly unlikely for reasons I’ll explain in a moment, sleeping eight hours per night puts your total accounted-for hours at 21 (again - that’s if your commute is only 30 minutes, one way).

This leaves you with three hours a day to exercise, groom, sleep, spend time with your family and friends, clean your house, do laundry, take care of your pets, pay bills, decompress from work, do any hobbies that are important to you, grocery shop, and attend to other appointments and errands (ope—wait, never mind, you can’t—the post office, DMV, your doctor and dentist, and most places aside from grocery stores are closed by the time you get off work). You might also notice that “rest and recovery” are completely missing from that list; sorry, but there’s no time for rest and recovery when you’re grinding yourself into dust to prove to the corporate and tech overlords that you’re worth a shit.

Since it isn’t physically possible to do all the non-work things that must be done, folks will inevitably pull from the easiest bucket of hours: sleep. In reality, you will probably end up spending something like 6-7 hours a day doing “life”, giving yourself 4-5 hours of sleep per night and relying on caffeine, energy drinks, and the adrenaline and cortisol spikes from being so completely overwhelmed in order to get you through the day.

All of this is likely to raise your blood pressure and lead to all kinds of other health issues caused by inadequate sleep and too much stress. Don’t @ me, this is well documented science with a ton of data to back it up. Simply do an internet search for “what does chronically high levels of cortisol do to a person’s body” if you don’t believe it.

But sure, “work-life balance”, as a phrase and concept, is the real villain here.

They’re trying to trick us into believing that this is what discipline looks like.

Setting aside the math for a moment, let’s get one thing straight: grind is not the same thing as discipline. Working round the clock, trying to prove our worth by doing the most and appearing the most busy, isn’t discipline. In fact, I’d argue that it’s specifically undisciplined.

What takes real discipline is knowing ourselves well enough to know what unique abilities we bring to the table, what conditions produce our best work, and what our limitations are, and then creating sturdy boundaries and limits—even when the incentives not to are incredibly tempting—because that’s what it takes to protect and nurture what makes us great at what we do.

“Hustle and grind if you want to be great” is, as my grandfather would have said, total hogwash. You think anyone is making the best possible decisions on four hours of sleep a night, when they haven’t eaten a real meal in goodness knows how long? Do we really believe that simply throwing more hours at a problem at the expense of preserving the conditions that have been empirically proven to be the most conducive to creativity, motivation, and innovation results in true greatness more often than it destroys it?

It turns out that there are data on this too: clear thinking requires sustainable conditions. Studies also show that there are diminishing returns on productivity after 40-50 hours of work per week.

We are wired for connection and community; it is part of what makes us human. Being part of a community was quite literally a requirement for survival for our ancient ancestors; we need connection in order to live into our full humanity. In other words, a rich personal life that’s full of joy, wonder, curiosity, and a greater purpose has the amazing benefit of making us better at whatever work we do.

But true discipline isn’t only about self knowledge and boundaries; it’s also about recognizing bullshit. And after working a 12-hour day on 4 hours of sleep, most of us won’t have the cognitive bandwidth to stop and wonder why, if it’s bad for our health and not even all that great for our corporate overlords, wealth hoarders are so obsessed with convincing us that wanting time and space to cultivate a life and community we enjoy is bad, actually.

So why are they doing this?

There is much to be gained by all of the sentient “black holes of wealth” who keep pushing this malignant narrative. Think about it: when we are all exhausted, overwhelmed, and emotionally depleted, we don’t have enough fuel in the tank to look up and see who’s actually benefitting from all of our suffering. As our survival instincts run more and more of the show, we start to understand that the only way to get ahead—or to even get comfortably above the water we are told we’re lucky to be treading—is to lean hard into “the grind”.

We turn on each other, rolling the shit we’re getting from above us in the hierarchy downhill onto those below us. We resent coworkers who leave at 5:00 pm. We call people “lazy” when they work only 40 hours a week. We make LinkedIn posts about what it really takes to get ahead: grinding your ass off. We work more, more, more hours. 60. No wait, 72. Still not enough; 80. Even 100 hours a week—and we are proud of the fact that we are doing so, even thankful for the opportunity!

What could we be doing if we had the time and physical, mental, and emotional bandwidth? Organize for causes we believe in. Demand humane work conditions, sensible requirements of our time, and sturdy boundaries between work and personal life. Have energy to call out the wealth hoarding and egregious consolidations of power that are happening all around us. Make sure our fellow human beings are ok. Serve our communities. Volunteer to canvas for folks running for office on human-first platforms. Getting clear on who we want to become, take stock of who we are now, and begin taking steps to calibrate our beliefs and behaviors as we pursue a path to becoming our best selves.

But right now, we can’t; we have time for nothing else except work.

Do you smell that?

The rise of hustle-and-grind culture is like a sour fart in a room. The more wealth, power, and resources billionaires amass, the more they want; it’s never enough. But how can they carry out these plans without willing participants? They need us to want to do it.

To convince us, they crop dust us with a never-ending stream of bad faith baloney about how if we want to be like them, we have to work as though working to fulfill someone else’s total domination fever dream should be a calling unto itself. As an aside, I’d definitely go to a Bad Faith Baloney concert, just sayin’.

Then there’s the constant drivel about how entitled people are these days to think that they deserve a living wage and health care, and no one wants to work anymore, and we’ll never be successful unless we do nothing else but work, and on, and on, and on.

The giant, fart-filled room that is the world we live in has been getting smellier year after year, but we don’t even notice because we are nose blind to it. So nose blind that at this point, it’s like someone has fully shit their proverbial pants (business titans giddy with joy over eliminating entire sectors of jobs in favor of AI, with no regard for what it’s doing to people’s livelihoods, communities, the planet, and humanity) and we don’t even smell it.

We’re all just… used to it. Acting like this is normal and scrambling to do more and more to appease them; we kind of have to, since they control so much of what impacts our day to day existence. As if the smell of actual human feces is just what ambition smells like, and that’s that; and refusing to clear the stench (or failing to notice it entirely) proves our worth and is what success requires.

Crab mentality has taken over.

Thinking that the problem is really each other as we self-select into spaces and communities that reflect who we believe we are, then proceeding to blame “the others” for what we think is wrong with the world, we are like crabs in a bucket, pulling each other down.

Meanwhile, the ruling elite hoard wealth that could end homelessness and hunger— you know, in between chastising us for not having enough babies (as if child care and diapers grow on the few trees we have left) and shooting down pretty much any measures society could take to make it more desirable for us to do so—and CEOs force return-to-office mandates that waste hours of our lives, fail to increase productivity, and add unnecessary pollution via commutes.

It’s time to clear the air.

The loneliness epidemic is partly the result of burnout and overwork. We don’t have time to sit quietly with ourselves and think clearly about what’s really important to us; to consider the depth—or lack thereof—of our connection with and to other human beings, let alone do something to strengthen those relationships if we find them suffering. Many of us don’t know what our own values are and can’t sit in silence for even an hour to start figuring it out.

If we were able to reach that level of self awareness and clarity, we might see that this system is designed to keep us spending our one, short life to make a few obscenely rich people even richer, and this might make us angry.

That anger might then light a fire under our collective ass to make some changes, such as reconnecting with other human beings and with ourselves, learning how to align our mindset and behaviors with our values, and practicing setting and maintaining sturdy boundaries around our most precious resource: time.

This reconnection with ourselves, this alignment of our values and behaviors with what we want to put out into the world; these are the first steps to start circulating that nasty, sour-fart air out of the room. People who know who they are and what they value don’t trade their lives for scraps, and that is the real threat facing those pulling the levers of power. Why else would they be going so hard on the narrative that we are lazy if we aren’t busy 24 hours a day? They know that once we come up for air and consider what we are getting in return for what we’re trading, we’ll refuse to accept it.

We can begin by reflecting deliberately on what kind of legacy we want to leave, how we want to be remembered, and what we want to create for ourselves. Once we figure that out, we can practice the mindsets, skills, and behaviors that will bring us closer to that vision of our future selves, one decision and interaction at a time.

As we experience how it feels to make choices and behave in ways that are in complete alignment with who we want to be, we start to like ourselves more. The more we like ourselves, the more grounded confidence we feel (borrowing that term from Brené Brown because it perfectly captures what I’m describing). And the more confident we become, the more we feel justified in saying, “This system is not healthy for me. I don’t want to spend my life this way, and no one should have to.” And if enough of us believe this, we can effect sweeping systemic change.

I don’t know about y’all, but I’m ready to open a window and grab the metaphorical Febreze.