“All I want is work-life balance.”
How often have you had this thought?
In theory, it makes sense: We strive to spend our lives well. That means directing the right amounts of time, effort, and attention to life’s many domains, from the necessities to taking care of ourselves to what’s most important to us.
Therefore, if we could allocate our limited resources perfectly, we’d achieve the ultimate equilibrium — and with it calm and happiness, right?
I don’t think so. In fact, I believe work-life balance doesn’t exist — and I can prove it to you with a single question:
What does perfect work-life balance look like, in detail, in your very life?
In your ideally balanced life, how many hours will you work exactly? What will you eat? Which exercise routine will you follow? How often? How will you divvy up your time between friends and family? And when will you recharge?
If you can’t answer any of these questions off the top of your head, don’t worry. Nobody can. They’re a trap — but they highlight the first problem with our desire for work-life balance: We never even define success. For most of us, balance is a nebulous state in the future where, somehow, we manage our lives perfectly, and there’s enough time for everything.
But why don’t we clarify that vision? It’s because, deep down, we know whatever “perfect schedule” we’d decide on, it’d immediately fall apart when confronted with reality. Life is fundamentally chaotic. Even our best plans can be derailed by the tiniest disruption, from a jealous boss to a crying toddler to a shower of rain.
This segues into a second problem: We treat work-life balance as a prize to attain we can then own forever. We believe our lives will be “done” once we finally “have” work-life balance. But in a world where change is the only constant there is little we can own for long at all, let alone freeze an undefined — and anyway unfeasible — state of affairs in time.
In the end, our dream of work-life balance is nothing but a convenient distraction. A murky vision we leave deliberately unspecified so we can avoid the inevitable truth: The version of balance we long for does not exist.
So what’s this really about?
The Reality We Can’t Escape
The mathematician Carl Jacobi used to “invert, always invert,” to solve his problems. Following his logic, let’s pretend we achieved immaculate work-life balance. Would we suddenly become “billionaires with perfect abs,” as Derek Sivers likes to joke? Would we be infallible fathers, daughters, and friends? No. Of course not.
Even if we gave our very best in every area of life in perfect proportions, we’d still come up short from time to time — but at least everything would be taken care of. That’s a great phrase, isn’t it? “Taken care of.” It sounds so comforting. I believe that’s what this is all about: reassurance.
“Tell me everything will be okay.” That’s what we’re really asking from life when we demand foolproof work-life balance. Not simply more money. Or time. After all, when has a windfall of either ever definitively quenched our thirst for work-life balance?
No. We want certainty. A map. To know how the book is going to end. We want a list of everything that’s coming our way, now and forever, with exact dates, times, and a 5-step plan for handling it all. That’s impossible, and we know it, but admitting this truth is terrifying.
As soon as we concede that anything can happen and nothing’s guaranteed, our last hope for inner peace goes out the window. Who can reassure us then? How will we ever feel that things are taken care of?
Going back to Jacobi’s favorite subject — math — if the city-sized asteroid that killed the dinosaurs had flown 0.035 meters per second slower, it would have breezed right past our planet. That’s less than 3% of your walking speed. A few inches, and hooray dinosaurs, no humans.
Meanwhile, 66 million years and as many unlikely events later, here we are. Each of us born against 400 trillion to one odds, yet every day, 3,300 people die in car accidents. Over 100 natural disasters happen each week, and every year, some crazy politician might send us into World War III. Uncertainty is as baked into life as our DNA is into our bodies.
We are far from the first who must live with this truth. “Into such a world have we entered, and under such laws do we live,” Seneca wrote 2,000 years ago. And though life’s randomness may play out in statistics we love to analyze, much like a cold rock approaching Earth at high speed, none of those numbers care whether you live or die, let alone about your plans.
Clearly, if we want inner peace, it’ll have to come from somewhere else. But where?
Finding True Calm
How can you keep your composure even when the world is ending? The TV show Alice in Borderland constantly asks this question. Forced to play cruel, life-or-death games in a strange reality, teenager Arisu loses many of his allies en route to beating the Queen of Hearts. Right before their demise, however, each friend shines in the same way: They face death head-on.
In a game only one person can win, Arisu’s childhood besties Karube and Chouta let the timer run out in his favor. Playing an impossible guessing game, Chishiya consciously puts his life into his opponent’s hands. And after putting his team into a tight spot, Tatta sacrifices himself so others might live. Ironically, once these characters accept the possibility they might die, all fretting disappears. They simply go on, and sometimes, they emerge victorious against the odds.
Thankfully, our everyday lives aren’t as dramatic, but the principle still stands: If we want lasting inner peace in a world where nothing is guaranteed, we must look uncertainty straight in the eye.
The calm we seek can never come from false hope or a fake solution, because neither holds any substance. That substance must come from us. We might be too puny to control the universe, but we can still tell it to bring it on—and then have full confidence in our ability to handle whatever game it might force us to play.
Of course, the best way to trust in one of your skills is to actually have it.
The Balance We Actually Need
The Oxford English Dictionary defines balance as “a situation in which different elements are equal.” Hmph. Aren’t different elements different by definition? What else you got, Oxford? “An even distribution of weight enabling someone or something to remain upright and steady.” Okay. Interesting. And what does an even distribution require? “A counteracting weight or force.” Aha! Activity! Movement! Now we’re getting somewhere.
“To balance” is to “put (something) in a steady position so that it does not fall.” Hmm. That sounds like work. But it also sounds like something I can actually do. If we want balance, it appears, we must “counteract or equal the effect of,” well, whatever threatens our balance!
Are you sitting right now? Standing? Walking? Whatever position you are in, at this very moment, you’re performing an act of balance. Your head doesn’t just fall to the side — because you are holding it up. Your knees don’t give way and collapse — because you are flexing the right muscles. Even if you’re lying down, raising your head to read or stretching your arms to hold your phone, all of that requires balance — the verb, not the noun.
Nikita Chepanov’s handstand teacher taught him that standing, even when done unconsciously since being two years old, is still a learned behavior. So is standing on your hands: You must fight to maintain the position. “One must be constantly paying attention to what needs adjusting,” Nikita writes.
When the writer Michael Hyatt did an outdoor ropes course with a group, he realized that “when we were balanced, it never really felt like we were.” Their knees were shaking, “but we stayed on that line a long time: making little corrections, adjusting our weight, and trying to stay upright.”
True balance is dynamic, intentional, and not always the same as rest. Movement is part of the process and, in fact, the only way to stay balanced. Albert Einstein knew as much: “Life is like riding a bicycle,” he said. “In order to keep your balance, you must keep moving.”
A ballerina posing en pointe appears “weightless, floating on air,” Gary Keller writes in The One Thing. But look closer, and you’ll see “her toe shoes vibrating rapidly, making minute adjustments.” Balance is the illusion of stasis, fueled by constant adaptation.
What all these stories — and even the dictionary — tell us is that, be it physically, mentally, emotionally, or even spiritually, we can’t “have” balance, let alone keep it. We must earn it every day.
When you wake up with a massive headache, balance might mean allowing yourself to postpone a product launch for a week. When an urgent task lands on your desk late Friday afternoon, balance can be taking a walk or meditating for ten minutes before pushing through. And when you find yourself well-rested and full of energy after brunch on day three of your vacation, balance could mean starting the first chapter of your romantasy novel now instead of waiting until you’re back in the everyday grind.
Balance is not a state of average, of consistency, of firing on all cylinders at an equally low flame. It is the habit of being open, ready, and interested. Of showing flexibility, tenacity, and the willingness to dance with uncertainty.
Ultimately, balance is the ability to reinvent yourself at any moment — and only those who know they truly hold that power will sleep peacefully at night.
All You Need To Know
We’ve all sighed over a last-minute assignment that kept us from our loved ones, wishing for better work-life balance. Who can blame us? To be human is to dream — but in this case, the dream remains both unspecified and unattainable.
In our hearts, we know the static, lasting version of work-life balance we desire does not exist. Still, we cling to this fantasy because it lets us avoid the harsh but ultimately inevitable truth: Life is unpredictable, and there’s little we control. That’s scary to admit and even scarier to face every day.
Ironically yet thankfully, uncertainty loses a good chunk of its bite once we face it head on. Like our fictional heroes accepting their mortality, we, too, can look at the countless changes life sends our way and say: “I might not have all the answers, but I’ll find one for each question you ask me.”
In this context, balance can indeed help us take back our power — it just happens to be a different kind than the one we originally sought.
Balance the verb, as opposed to the noun, is about learning, being mindful, and moving forward even when our knees are shaking. It is the daily habit of constantly adjusting we must cultivate, the mindset of adaptability we must earn again and again through our attitudes and actions.
In its truest form, balance looks different every day. It could mean resting when it feels inconvenient as much as taking action before you’re ready. It could be a physical act of recovery or a mental conversation with yourself. One day you’ll have to offer yourself a tiny bit of emotional grace, the next you may have to accept a deep, spiritual realization as it reveals itself.
Only once everyday balancing becomes second nature to us can we meet life’s fickleness without flinching. After all, the most compelling proof of our endurance is having endured many times in the past. We cannot fake this confidence, only merit it, but from this one conviction, genuine inner peace will flow — like the water in my favorite philosopher’s analogy:
Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.
Water may seem to move in contradiction, even uphill, but it chooses any way open to it so that it may reach the sea. It may flow swiftly or it may flow slowly, but its purpose is inexorable, its destiny sure. Be water, my friend.
— Bruce Lee