Still a relevant struggle in 2025, Work – Life Balance has had a half-assed makeover to Work – Life Integration. With the latter being potentially far worse than the former.
I won’t pour over this for too long… this is more of a brain dump of my thoughts on it and how I’ve managed to achieve a reframe – think of a see-saw.
For me, Work – Life Balance is a still a struggle because the two should not be separate, and for some it’s not which is good (provided you enjoy your work.)
For others, Work – Life Integration seems to work…. for me, sounds like the work should be enjoyable to you if it does work for you.
What my insight is, is that Life Balance is achievable and perhaps the only true phrase of the former mentioned. I know, you can’t balance a singularity but Life by definition doesn’t imply singularity. Life by definition can mean “the period between the birth and death of a living thing, especially a human being.” as defined by Oxford Languages.
And come on, we all know there’s a whole lot of good and bad in-between Birth and Death…. Life Balance. The term has been out there, just not as widely accepted.
Work is the substrate of Life. It takes work to be happy, it takes work to reach yoru goals, it takes work to crawl then to walk then to run, it takes work to be lazy, it takes work to be sad, you get the point…
Perhaps, it all the more reason to do work you love, so it doesn’t feel like work. Though we can only mitigate the feeling of work because during the hard times, the times in the tragedies of life, that’s when the most excrutiating of work is required – the work to carry on without those we love…
Or the work for them to carry on when you are gone, as you would want them to.
