Imagine that you’ve lost everything in a nasty lawsuit. You go from working a great job and living in a nice house to biking to shifts at McDonald’s so your family, now living in a single-room mobile home, doesn’t starve. How would you feel?
“If you could actually imagine that and say, ‘I could do that. I wouldn’t want to do that, but I could do that,’ then you’re free,” suggests Robert Puff, Ph.D., a Southern California–based clinical psychologist, corporate trainer, bestselling author and creator of the Happiness Podcast. “People that are fearless are much happier.”
Puff tells his clients this story as an exercise in the power of letting go of unrealistic measures of success and focusing on the present rather than worrying about the future. He describes working with incredibly successful people who are unhappy because they’ve put their lives on hold to work and make money, with the idea that they’ll stop and enjoy life once they’ve reached a certain milestone. As a result, their personal and work lives are out of balance.
“Usually, it’s men,” Puff notes. “These men will work very hard—100-hour, 120-hour workweeks for years—and then they’ll make this massive amount of money from this: 5 million to 500 million to 5 billion. And then they’re done. They say, ‘I’m done. I can now become a good father. I can be a good husband. I can be a great person.’”
But it doesn’t work that way, Puff says. “You can’t put your life on hold for that long without there being consequences to it. Work-life balance is critical in the success world.”
Work-life balance is not a new concept
The concept of figuring out how to balance work and life is not new, but it hasn’t been around forever either.
“The idea of balancing work and life was… a new invention when capitalism hit, when people started to work certain hours of the day—from nine-to-five, for example,” explains Shiori Shakuto, Ph.D., a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Sydney who addresses work-life balance in her book After Work, which comes out in January.
“The idea of work-life balance is interesting because it actually creates boundaries between the domains of work and life, and that has not always been the case,” she says. “For instance, before the corporate culture of salaried labor, when most people [were] in agricultural labor, the boundaries between work and life [had] always been blurred. You sometimes work, and you come back for lunch, and then you go out again.”
But Shakuto notes that the people working outside the home as salaried laborers were traditionally men. For women, she says, work-life boundaries have always been more blurred. “This idea that work and life [can] so nicely, clearly be demarcated is actually a pretty male-centered idea.”
Women’s traditional life roles and “the domain of home [have] been undervalued or [are] considered a feminine, feminized domain,” Shakuto notes, adding that women working outside the home still have outsized roles at home that muddle work-life boundaries. For example, from 2021 to 2022, 59% of unpaid caregivers in the U.S. are women, according to a Wells Fargo economics report.
Shakuto adds that in female-dominated sectors, such as nursing, day care, and health work, frequent overtime is “justified somehow because it’s considered passion work.”
What’s changed?
“Work-life imbalance is associated with decreased job satisfaction, productivity and eventual burnout,” according to an article published in the Clinics in Colon and Rectal Surgery journal.
As the authors put it in 2014, “Today, work-life balance is also a multimillion-dollar industry and a deciding factor in choosing jobs as diverse as Wall Street bankers and physicians. A Google search for ‘work-life balance’ brings up more than 296,000,000 results, including links for tools for work-life balance, scientific articles and consulting companies to help create work-life balance.”
Now, 10 years later, the same Google search turns up 10 times as many results—about 2.9 billion. What has changed in that time?
One obvious transformation is the growing popularity of smartphones and social media platforms since the early 2000s. Technology “[makes] dominant the domains of work and [lets] that permeate through the domains of life,” Shakuto says. This trend was aggravated during the COVID-19 pandemic, when people began working from home and work time began spilling over into evenings and weekends.
COVID-19 made “visible to people the idea that work and life [are] not as separate as [they’re] presented, which has always been the case and was obvious to perhaps many women—but now it’s… made apparent to men as well,” Shakuto adds.
And then there’s the social media comparison factor. As Puff points out, 20 years ago, you might have been much less successful than your fellow high school graduates, but you wouldn’t necessarily have known it. “Now, because of social media, you see them on a private jet, and you see them eating at these great restaurants,” he says.
But he points out that on social media, people “only show the parts of their life that are perfect. They don’t show all the dysfunction…. There’s a sense of brainwashing going on out there through social media that is making people think, ‘If I work really hard and if I get a lot of money, everything’s going to be great.’ And I just would like to disabuse people of that. It doesn’t mean you’re going to be unhappy. It just doesn’t make you happy.”
“Once we get in the comparing game, there’s always someone better than us,” he adds. “There’s always someone above us. And that means no matter how high we get, no matter how great we get, it will never be enough. It’s far better to say, “How am I doing? Can I improve on how I’m doing?’ And make myself a better person… and not try to compare myself to other people.”
How to find a good work-life balance
How do you know if your work life and personal life are out of balance? How can you check if you’re managing your time and stress well or are at risk of burnout?
Puff suggests asking yourself, “Are you tired? Are you waking up naturally, or are you waking up exhausted?” If you come home every night and need a bottle of wine or painkillers or rely on other artificial aids or addictions, then you know you’re off-kilter. “I’ve spent my life trying to figure out what makes people happy,” he says. “And happiness is not, ‘Someday I’ll be happy.’ Happy is, ‘I am doing OK right now without any form of external influence.’”
Shakuto says that her “research [and] book [are] advocating for valuing these activities at home that [are] now undervalued.” She also suggests that activities affiliated with “home” create community, emotional health and relationships “that you actually need to have a very good life.”
Puff’s recommendation is to make a conscious effort to enjoy the present, even while working, and make time for your family and personal life even during your prime career years. He also promotes meditation and mindfulness and suggests that instead of aiming to be happy someday, make it a goal to be happy now. “What if you said throughout the day, ‘I’m going to have moments and pockets of times where my heart is lighter, my heart is happier and my heart finds joy in the present moment’?” he asks.
“A thing I like about successful people [is that] they are goal-driven,” he adds. “So I would say now, start creating goals about watching sunsets, going on dates with your wife or your husband [and] spending time with your kids. Make that part of your goals.”
Puff points to Europeans who “work much, much less than we do” and lead happier lives. “If you enjoy what you do, and you take time to go on vacation… you’re not going to have such an urgency to get out of work and be done with it.” In that vein, he notes that finding a fulfilling work-life balance can have not only psychological and physical benefits but also fiduciary benefits. If you’re happier in your work and life, you can keep working for longer.
“You will make way more money by creating a work-life balance,” he says.
You can’t put your life on hold for that long without consequences. Work-life balance is critical in the success world.” Make a conscious effort to enjoy the present, even while working, and make time for your family and personal life even during your prime career years.
Photo by: JLco Julia Amaral/Shutterstock
