• Work And Life Should Not Be Separate In The First Place

    “I can’t wait for the weekend to reach!” is every employee’s silent or overt lamentation, thanks to their daily encounters with robotic routines at their work places.

    The number one reason why people yearn for weekends is the never ending fatigue and stress in their daily 9 to 5 jobs. People are not only stuck in jobs and robotic routines they don’t like but are also entangled in an eternal and cyclic craving for weekends while loathing workdays.

    The robotic and cyclic routines suck the sweetness out of their lives leaving weekends as their only last resorts to have the life they long to have.

    In one of my evening introspections, I wondered whether this is how we ought to live. How did we get to this point of purposelessness? What is the cause of these ubiquitous zombie-like livelihoods? Is there an unexplored avenue for greater satisfaction that humanity doesn’t know?

    All these were questions bubbling through my mind as I recalled how my friend emitted a sigh because the weekend was fast approaching.

    Our outcries about these lifeless engagements from 9 to 5 have motivated motivational speakers to advocate for a phenomenon called, “Work-Life balance”. They suggest that work and life ought to be subject to see-saw of sorts so as to mitigate what could be overwhelming of the two.

    When I consulted the biographies of renowned billionaires and other successful people like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, I found out that they don’t buy the idea of work-life balance.

    Amazon billionaire, Bezos, advocates for work-life harmony instead. He argues that the phenomenon of work-life balance is misleading because it disintegrates work from life and life from work.

    The notion of work-life balance has an implicit assumption that work and life are two conflicting avenues one has to participate in differently.

    More often than not, work is viewed as an inconvenience to life and not as an integral part of life.

    So, Bezos asserts that to escape this lifelessness that has engulfed our work, we ought to look at work as an integral part of life and life as an integral part of work.

    However, some tech entrepreneurs like Roberto Martinez have unashamedly said that engaging in the process of building a startup has the potential to consume all of your attention and deprive you of all social and family life.

    In other words, sometimes work requires a tradeoff between it and other life activities for it to yield significant results.