Things cost money. Staying at home doesn’t buy things. Going out there and making as much money as possible is the best thing to do. Everyone wants to live the good life. But the good life costs. So what if you can’t make it to the softball game or the ballet recital! If you are bringing home big bucks, you are doing more for your family than any amount of time will.

How can a kid be cool if mom or dad only works 40 hours a week but brings home diddley squat? I would rather work a ton of hours and make a ton of money than come home at the same time and sit in the house with a nagging wife and bratty children. A family has to understand that having things is more important than being together. Working less is not an option!

THE WORK WILL STILL BE HERE WHEN WE’RE DEAD.

Our family, friends and our own joy matter more than some task. When the kids are grown, our time to train and nurture them has past. “I-love-yous”said to the dead are never heard. Furthermore, if I’m hit by the proverbial bus, my co-workers will take only a moment to feign mourning before fighting with each other over my position and its salary. The work will go on without me. It’s that simple.

I came to this realization after nearly drowning on a camping trip 15 years ago. Since then, I traveled abroad, learned about wine, learned the guitar, worked on my chess game, became a pretty good cook, met my wife of 11 years and became father to 2 delightful children. I’m a more contented, appreciative and well-rounded person. I don’t want to go back to the way I was. You don’t have to drown yourself in work to learn the value of balance. Just choose to invest your time in the pursuits that bring the greatest return.

Video of the lecture here:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5784740380335567758

Slides here:

http://www.alice.org/Randy/timetalk.htm

ps. love the comments so far and your response to the NYT article Danah.

How do you achieve work-in-one-area / work-in-another-area balance? What if you like to think about social networks but also play the bass in a band? What if you are a programmer who also writes comic strips?

The answer is this: the work-centric peer group has no problem at all with work/work balance or work/play balance. There are plenty of successful models for that.

What we have is a taboo in this society: Childrearing, householding, and community work are all intellectually relevant topics, but unfortunately remedies for barfing 3 year olds is not considered as sexy as how to balance the demands of your band with your work.

The underlying conflict, I believe, has to do with a rigid sense of control. I can control my band schedule, my art and cooking classes, my off-grid-mountaineering-travel schedule. If it’s too onerous, I can always just walk, after all. But I can’t control my child suddenly having trouble at school. We have a problem in this society not with work/life balance, but with allowing ambiguity and chaos of life to upset our rigid pursuit of whatever we’re after.

When we’re in our 20′s, we’re driven by our own interests and the thrill of our freedom. But as we take on long term responsibility for others, we increase in our skills at mediation, motivation, inspiration… but at the expense of always being able to pursue our own schedule.

That’s what this is.

It’s not work/life balance. It’s how to handle responsibilities beyond ourselves as we age; how to enjoy that this makes us stronger and how to mitigate the risks that it can exhaust us.

How do you achieve work-in-one-area / work-in-another-area balance? What if you like to think about social networks but also play the bass in a band? What if you are a programmer who also writes comic strips?

The answer is this: the work-centric peer group has no problem at all with work/work balance or work/play balance. There are plenty of successful models for that.

What we have is a taboo in this society: Childrearing, householding, and community work are all intellectually relevant topics, but unfortunately remedies for barfing 3 year olds is not considered as sexy as how to balance the demands of your band with your work.

The underlying conflict, I believe, has to do with a rigid sense of control. I can control my band schedule, my art and cooking classes, my off-grid-mountaineering-travel schedule. If it’s too onerous, I can always just walk, after all. But I can’t control my child suddenly having trouble at school. We have a problem in this society not with work/life balance, but with allowing ambiguity and chaos of life to upset our rigid pursuit of whatever we’re after.

When we’re in our 20′s, we’re driven by our own interests and the thrill of our freedom. But as we take on long term responsibility for others, we increase in our skills at mediation, motivation, inspiration… but at the expense of always being able to pursue our own schedule.

That’s what this is.

It’s not work/life balance. It’s how to handle responsibilities beyond ourselves as we age; how to enjoy that this makes us stronger and how to mitigate the risks that it can exhaust us.

This is just to tell you that i translated your post into French on my blog.

From my POV of a woman who has been working full-time since 1973, got married with two children, and tried hard to achieve that famous balance, i very truly understand your concerns and worries. As you and your readers point out, they are universal (countries, ages, genders). Thank you.

Most of the time i feel that i have not been enough of a “femme de tête” and that i missed many professional opportunities. But in the meantime i am pretty sure that my significant other, my family, my friends, and even my children now that they are almost adults, they all think that i found that famous balance between my job and… them. At the end of the day, i am simply happy to believe that what they think about me is true.

Good ol’ Frederick Winslow Taylor taught us how to be paid for piecework, and follow best practices before they were so named. And despite the fact that many aspects of our society are no longer in the industrial age, modern institutions stubbornly remain firmly mired in their Dickensian workhouse roots.

It is, I think, incumbent on those of us to claim to understand the effects of ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity – that to my mind describes the world as we wittingly or unwittingly experience it – to consciously enact a change to the imposed paradigm of constant competition, continual economic expansion, and the myth that there is some sort of dichotomy between work and life.

Ideally (and yes, I understand the critical and problematic issues surrounding what I’m about to say), what one does to maintain one’s economic viability should be entirely entwined with living integrally and authentically. The more apparent the issue of co-called work/life balance becomes, the less integrated it is with one’s life, suggesting that a reconsideration might be called for.

Took me (what I estimate to be) half my (total) life to figure this out and begin to enact it. Losing the paradigm of “money as scorecard” helps. So does being entirely present and engaged in whatever it is one is doing or with whomever one is at the moment, as well as embracing one’s uncertainty with as much gusto as embracing one’s passion.

The per-piece pocket-change wage is one prevalent and growing model for online journalism, and that’s indeed a problem. And it should be troubling not just for the the poor ol’ blogger, but for anyone who thinks that good journalism is one of the legs upon which modern society stands.