Dream-Reality Balance
On the origin and fallacy of work-life balance
Anatomic pathologists like their patients because they are patient.
No emergencies. Once a patient is dead, they are dead. No amount of medicine can bring them back.
While accompanying a pathologist in my first post-mortem as an intern doctor, he stressed this point so much that by the time I was leaving, he asked me:
Why do we like our patients?
To which I responded:
Because they are patient.
He nodded. It turns out that I’m a quick learner.
A close friend whom I have known since our elementary school days and with whom we once shared a hostel on campus, told me he picked pathology because he didn’t like the high-octane adrenaline in the ICU. In contrast, I enjoy working in the ICU.
Another decided not to do paediatrics because he could not imagine not getting a peripheral venous line while controlling the baby’s rants amid a family that hopes you get it on the first try, but (surprise, surprise) without pricking the baby. She couldn’t handle the cries at work and the cries at home. It’s not impossible — it’s unpossible.
Another who is in his second graduate year, on the way to becoming a physician, wonders why he is doing all this work only to be paid the same amount as he was as a general practitioner. It beats the purpose, so he claims. The hard work does not match the kind of life he anticipates.
Another openly confessed :
I just want one of two things. Either Big Pharma or Insurance, because Innocent , what the hell? Why am I doing anaesthesia?
The single reason all of them cite is work-life balance.
I’ve never been a fan of that phrase. It is blinding, deceiving, and cavalierly flaunted for its apparent wholesomeness. In reality, it’s a space that does not exist.
Let me be clear — work-life balance does not exist. I’ll explain why.
Proportional thinking
The kind of math we’re taught in school contrasts with our rough world.
Integers between 0 and 9 on a number line leave little space for decimal points. Life, however, operates in the decimal zone.
Normal systolic blood pressures are between 90 and 139. Normal temperature is dependent on where you place the probe on the body. Normal vision is a range, despite the 20/20 or 6/6 score.
I am unaware of any school that teaches anyone about this transition from the formal, pristine world of mathematics into the fractal one in which we live. We are, therefore, mentally trapped in a logical world but physically exist in a rugged one. It is easier to craft a work-life balance in our minds that is as sharp as the numbers 1 and 2.
Even better, if one is -2, then the other is +2. A good balance. What most confess is that such a consistent balance is impossible, because there are days when you swing to -7 and don’t get back into the positive zone, and vice versa. Regardless, this mental model is deceiving.
First, it assumes a bimodal assessment of days. Only when the opposites balance, a negative and a positive, does one have a ‘balanced’ life. Furthermore, while it takes on a static perspective of one’s life and career, it downplays the dynamism of life.
Without dynamism, life ceases to exist. Dynamism is not binary. It oscillates. There is no balance. Only feedback systems. Once we acknowledge this fact, the next fallacy becomes evident — numbers tell very little about a system.
Economists and managers will insist that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. The phrase leaves out the context in which the numbers make sense. A heart rate of 150 in a patient can have several causes, all of which are contextually dependent. Is the patient from a night out with friends or from surgery? Are they bleeding? What is their temperature, and does that correlate with the blood pressure? Are they scared? Are they from climbing the staircase?
These numbers are pointless if you don’t know the driver of the symptoms. Economists play a losing game if they can’t find a story to explain the trajectory of the markets. Other forces, bigger than the numbers, are the drivers of the numbers.
Using a number line to describe a complex adaptive system, such as yourself, is conceding to a model that doesn’t benefit you.
Systems thinking
Now that we’ve established that you’re a system, systems thinking is how you should approach this problem. It’s hard to call it any other problem other than the work-life balance problem because that is how it is best understood.
Think of yourself as a lake. There are inlets and outlets. Inlets fill you up and outlets drain you. The goal is to have a lake that survives all forms of weather, seasons, or climates.
At any given time, the lake will never have a stagnant volume. It is always changing. The first way to ensure you always remain a lake is by ensuring your inflow rates more often than not exceed your outflow rate.
Notice I mention rate, a function of time. Since we tend to think in numbers, we like static figures, like the integers in a number line. How much am I going to spend this month? 10k. Static. This type of thinking is an extension of our clean mathematical model, where we’re still mentally enslaved.
A rate, in contrast, is something like this:
If I spend 10k today, that amounts to a 10k/day outflow. Did I have enough inflows in the week to buffer such an outflow? If in the last three days, you had 3.5k/day inflows with no outflow, then you will have something remaining in the lake.
Since you can never know the volume of the lake, the inflow and outflow rates can be a surrogate and sensitive variable to guide your actions. Notice that this too oscillates, like a dynamic system.
Lakes are different from rivers. A river easily floods. Lakes don’t. Lakes create a capacity to accommodate more as they grow, and even when the outflows increase, the landscape created by the lake remains for that time when the roles will be reversed, when inflows exceed outflows.
Thinking as a lake further holds the invaluable insight that there will be other changes that shouldn’t bother you. These are the unseen shocks you can sustain. Lakes evaporate. People bathe on its shores. Communities collect water. Herds drink on its banks. These are small changes compared to the outflow rivers.
Lakes are buffers. They can sustain shocks. You can sustain shocks. These shocks can be hidden if you focus on the inflows and outflows. Provided I know my inflow is greater than my outflow, the lake will continue to grow.
In reality, rates may be difficult to measure or monitor. But it’s not impossible. You don’t need to be great at it — you just need to do it with some individualized level of rationality. Individualized because, as J. Cole raps:
No such thing as a life that’s better than yours.
You set the parameters.
The other importance of looking at life from a systems perspective is that you identify which flows to prioritize. The world gets multidimensional once we start taking life from a system’s perspective.
My biggest issue with the work-life balance metaphor, however, is deeper than substituting one metaphor for another.
Dream-reality balance
A work-life balance assumes your life is clean and different from your work. It’s not.
You will work for most of your life. Some will not retire, as they may die along the way. Those who retire have adjusted their lives so much into that work life that they don’t know what to do after retirement. Your work is your life. Thus, there is no such thing as a work-life balance.
How you live is how you work. As much as we like to assume that we should not bring our work home, we do.
And if you’ve had great sex over the weekend, a family loss, or a much-needed break, we take that to work. You can’t separate the two.
Worse still, a work-life balance, as currently understood, implies the existence of agents working to make another agent realize their dream. Notice I use the word agents. The ones working to realize their dream are in the high agency group. The ones working to make the person realize their dream may or may not be the low agency group.
If you don’t have a project you’re building besides your 9–5 or the work shifts, then you’re likely in the low agency category. In contrast, if you have a side gig or project, you are definitely not in the low agency group, even though you may be working to realize someone else’s dream.
And that’s the biggest problem I have with the idea of a work-life balance.
By working, you’re making someone else bring their dreams into reality. The low agency types have not realized their dreams. Forgetting that you can dream, working for somebody else buries your aspirations deep into the mantle layer, where convection currents take them away from your circle of retrieval.
As your dream slips away, you wake up daily to the reality that you have to work. But since work doesn’t fulfill you as much as you would wish, you strive to get a life different from work. This is how the false idea of work-life balance is born.
J. Cole raps:
The good news nigga you came a long way
The bad news is nigga you went the wrong way
It’s a hologram. When you gaze into it for so long, it develops depth, supposedly. You then convince yourself that it’s the reality. It’s your reality, but not the one you dream of.
Dream-reality balance is the more creative and energy-infusing force we should have. The boldness to execute your dream, despite the setbacks, is the baseline for bringing it to reality.
Dreams, as they exist inside our minds, are abstract. They are like the clean, crisp integers between 0 and 9. Once you begin the journey to execute them, you realize they lie in the rugged decimal zone. However, the goal is to make it as clean as the numbers, an impossibility but one worth chasing.
This chase forms the dream-reality balance.
Like systems, this too is dynamic. It oscillates. It’s also worth pursuing for its own sake, because dreams can slip away just as fast as they hit you.
What I’m trying to say is…
J. Cole worked to bring his dream into reality. Small wonder he called his production Dreamville. Every time he’s on the grind, working, chasing a dream that’s always evolving.
Work-life balance doesn’t exist. It’s a hologram. When you have lived this life for so long, it becomes your reality.
But your life is more than just a hologram. When a cold bucket of ice hits you, you feel it. It’s not a hologram. Why live your life as one?
Forget the work-life balance.
Start chasing your dream-reality balance. Emphasis, your. Because, as J. Cole insists:
No such thing as a life that’s better than yours.
This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube