Work Life
work noun /wɝːk/
- an activity, such as a job, that a person uses physical or mental effort to do, usually for money
culture noun /ˈkʌl.tʃɚ/
- the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at a particular time
It’s the first day of school, you wake up, follow routine, you learn to obey structure. One grade to the next, one test to the other, years pass. It feels natural, like life is supposed to unfold this way. Struggle is expected, triumph is occasional, you move forward not always joyfully, often just adequately. Childhood blends into adolescence, then adulthood. 1 And then, one day, the routine changes: you begin to earn, you grow into an adult.
With this newfound income comes agency, the world, once a backdrop becomes accessible with this tool called money. You buy clothes you like, food you crave, experiences you once dreamed of. In the fine print of this newfound autonomy lies a binding contract : the work you do begins to shape you.
Work Place
The workplace isn’t a just a place where you work, it becomes a part of who you are. Spend enough time and colleagues become mirrors, benchmarks, even gatekeepers of how worthy you feel at the workplace. Workplace assigns metrics which seep into your life, in a way which the grade hopper wasn’t quite acquaint with: performance, promotion, prestige.
Subtly and slowly you align social lives, the way you dress, romantic interests, moral values, even dreams within the orbit of your profession. You make a conscious choice to live near the workplace to save up on commute time, mold habits - eat and drink the same stuff your peers do and change significant portions of lives to adapt to each new workplace, work which pays with a hidden cost. The workplace selects, shapes and sculpts lives over a slow & sure course.
Work-Life balance
Time is life’s currency 2, money is the illusion of value put to it. You trade time much more finite for salaries, hoping to buy freedom in social lives. Often it rarely does, the more you earn, the more it tethers to aspirations that cost more: better education, better housing, better gadgets 3. Money becomes the reason and work its causation, slowly you become careerists, chasing progress as a justification for the meaning of a better life, while you loose on real time, teetering on awkward work-life balance, fueling reports with sleepless nights and coffee breaks, in the hopes that the career will bring to fruition a more meaningful life which will be acknowledged.
Duality of the two
There is an Irony of living this life, by the day you are professional : polished, punctual, efficient, performant. By evening the attempt is to reclaim yourselves : a partner, a friend a dreamer, yet these two selves rarely meet, the self which is brought back home is often a tired copy of the one which went to work in the morning. You switch jobs and roles like uniforms, the residue of one bleeds into the other, a third of each day in the life being a cog in the machine, a machine which shapes the cog. 4
Work, at its core, dictates not just income. It is how societies build, sustain, and evolve. It’s how roads get paved, medicines discovered, software developed, and books written. Furthermore, it is the shared human effort that makes civilization function.
We work because work allows interdependence what Adam Smith called the division of labor. You do your part; someone else does theirs. In exchange, society moves forward.
But the irony lies in how far we’ve strayed from that vision. For many, work no longer leads to leisure, but replaces it. The promise of stability has quietly morphed into a perpetual state of striving. Productivity is no longer a means, but the goal itself. Still, without work, there is no collective progress. The issue isn’t that we work it’s how uncritically we let the work-life define us. 5
The Matrix
The question that is rather rarely reflected on is that: are you in the real control, or simply fulfilling a well-scripted role in the matrix ? Is the regular life the one which you live after work or the one that you choose to define ? Is the workplace the silent operator on our behalf ? Operating our daily decisions, emotions even one’s sense of worth ? The truth seems unsettling : control has largely been outsources, to expectations, to paychecks, to performance reviews; employees are graded at being effective machines in human skin. 6
The call isn’t to abandon society or your job or your duty and responsibilities but to reclaim ownership albeit a smaller chunk of it, after-all there must be some persona which defines you more than your resume more than what the workplace has calibrated so carefully over the years. In the quiet spaces between meetings, in the time before bed, or in the conversations not about work, lies the opportunity to rebuild that self.
[1] Considering populace of countries and places with stable modern growth archetypes and non-authoritarian regimes.
[2] Expendable and yet never enough
[3] “The things you own end up owning you.” - Fight Club
[4] “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.” - Jean Paul Sartre
[5] For the average person careers are usually extremely long. : Stats from European commission