Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are opening
a file that I think keeps most of our listeners
awake at night. In fact, if you're listening
to this on your commute, or even worse, while
you're trying to answer emails at 10 p .m., this
one is specifically for you. We are talking about
the holy grail of modern existence. Oh, boy.
Work -life balance. The white whale. The thing
we're all chasing but never quite seem to catch.
Exactly. And I think the standard story, the
one we tell ourselves, is that we are uniquely
broken. Right. We look at our smartphones. We
look at Slack. We look at the fact that our boss
can reach us literally anywhere. And we think,
this is it. Technology has ruined us. We are
the burnout generation. It feels incredibly specific
to right now, doesn't it? The whole idea that
we're tethered to the office by this, I don't
know, this invisible electronic leash. Right.
But and this is why I was so excited to go through
the research stack you brought today. You were
suggesting that we're completely wrong about
the timeline. This isn't just a millennial burnout
issue or a Zoom fatigue issue. You're telling
me that this struggle, this fight to draw a line
between labor and life. It's actually one of
the oldest tensions in human history. It is absolutely
fundamental. I mean, if you look at the sources
we have today, and they range from ancient philosophy
texts to medieval monastic rules all the way
to modern sociology, you see that human beings
have been arguing about where work stops and
life begins for, well, for at least 2 ,500 years.
Wow. We've been trying to negotiate this treaty
between our productive selves and our private
selves since... long, long before the iPhone
ever existed. That is simultaneously comforting
and incredibly depressing. It means we haven't
managed to solve it in two and a half millennia.
Well, you could say the nature of the battle
changes, but the war remains the same. And before
we really jump into the history, which gets really
fascinating when we look at how the idea of time
itself was basically invented, I think it is
crucial that we actually define what we're talking
about. Because work -life balance has become
such a buzzword, It's almost lost its teeth.
Yeah. It's something you see on a corporate values
poster right next to a stock photo of someone
doing yoga on a mountain. Exactly. We value work
-life balance here. Usually said by the person
who's emailing you on a Saturday. Right. But
what does the literature actually say it is?
What's the real definition? Strictly speaking,
based on the definitions in our source material,
work -life balance is the equilibrium between
two domains. On one side, you have the instrumental
tasks you do for survival or for status. On the
other, you have personal life, so family, leisure,
health, spiritual pursuits, all that stuff. Right.
But here is the crucial distinction that most
people miss, and it's the key to understanding
why we feel so stressed out by it. What's that?
It's bidirectional. Bidirectional. Okay, let's
unpack that because usually when I'm complaining
about my balance, I'm complaining about work
crashing into my life. Exactly. That's what we
call work -to -life conflict. That's the late
meeting that makes you miss your kid's soccer
game. That's the exhaustion from a project that
makes you too tired to cook dinner, so you just
order takeout again. Been there. But the definition
holds that private life can also interfere with
work. Life -to -work conflict. Right. If you
have a sick child at home or you're going through
a messy divorce or you just didn't sleep well
because you were up all night worrying about
something, that is your life bleeding into the
work container. Which is interesting because
most corporate policies, they're designed to
stop work from hurting life like, you know, vacation
days or whatever. But they aren't always great
at handling it when life hurts. Precisely. It's
an interface. And that interface can be adverse,
which is what researchers call work -life conflict.
Or it can be beneficial, which they call work
-life enrichment. We'll get to that later. But
the massive complication we're facing today,
and the sources are very, very clear on this,
is that for technology -enabled workers, that
interface has become boundaryless. Boundaryless.
That sounds like a horror movie title. It kind
of feels like one sometimes. It essentially means
the physical and temporal walls that used to
separate those two worlds have just dissolved.
Right. There's no factory whistle. There's no
commute to decompress. So our mission today is
to figure out how we got here. We're going to
trace the history of time itself from, you know,
the monks to the factory floor. OK. We're going
to look at the sociology, why we feel so torn.
And then we're going to look at the legal and
structural attempts to fix it from the invention
of the weekend to the very modern right to disconnect.
I love it. OK, let's get in the time machine.
And we are going way back, not to the 1950s,
but all the way to antiquity. You mentioned ancient
Greece. Now. When I think of Asia Greece, I think
of people in Togus just, you know, discussing
the nature of truth. Did they really worry about
work -life balance? They absolutely did, but
their framework was almost the inverse of ours.
Today, we often view work as the primary thing
we do. It gives us our identity, our status,
our money. Leisure is just the time we get to
recover so we can go back to work. It's a pit
stop. It's a pit stop. Right. Working for the
weekend. We rest so we can be productive again
on Monday. Exactly. We optimize our sleep to
be better workers. But for the classical Greeks,
and specifically for a guy like Aristotle, the
perspective was completely flipped. Work was
the means, leisure was the end. Leisure was the
goal. Yes. The actual word they used was skoli,
for leisure. And strangely enough, skoli is the
etymological root of our word school. Wait, really?
School comes from the word for leisure? That
is... That's incredibly ironic considering how
much work school feels like for most kids. It
is ironic now, but you have to understand what
Aristotle meant by leisure. He didn't mean chilling
out. He didn't mean lying on the couch watching
Netflix. Or the Greek equivalent, which I guess
would be watching a play by Sophocles. Right,
exactly. It wasn't just checking out. So it wasn't
passive. No, not at all. Scolo was the condition
for ethical cultivation. It was the time you
spent learning, contemplating, participating
in civic life, and basically becoming a better
citizen, a better human being. Wow. He argued
that a good political system, a good polity,
its main job is to protect time for education
and contemplation. If you are constantly grinding,
constantly working just for survival, you can't
be a full human being. You're just a beast of
burden. That is a profound indictment of modern
culture. We usually think if you aren't busy,
you're lazy. Aristotle is saying if you are busy,
you're stunted. You haven't reached the goal.
Essentially, yes. Aristotle linked the purpose
of toil to leisure, just as he linked the purpose
of war to peace. You fight wars to have peace.
You toil to have scola. If you toil just for
the sake of toiling or for the sake of accumulating
wealth, you've totally missed the point of being
alive. So it's not about the grind. It's about
what the grind enables. Precisely. And the Romans
picked up on this too, right? I know they were
a bit more practical, maybe a little philosophical,
but did they keep this distinction? They did.
And their vocabulary creates a really stark contrast
that I just love. They had the word otium, which
meant reflective, private time, that cultivation
we just talked about. Okay. Otium. And then for
public business or work, the word was negotium.
Negotium. That sounds like negotiation. It does.
But look at the prefix, negotium. It literally
translates to not leisure or the lack of leisure.
Oh, wow. So work was defined by what it wasn't.
It wasn't the good stuff. It was the absence
of the good stuff. Exactly. It frames work as
a negative state, as the thing you have to do
to get back to the thing you want to do. Cicero,
in his work on duties, he framed a good life
as this constant negotiation between these two
things, between your civic obligations, your
negotium, and your private cultivation, your
otium. The goal was to balance public duty with
private growth. But I have to ask the obvious
question here because this all sounds lovely,
but Aristotle and Cicero, they were elites. Yes.
They were wealthy men. This philosophy of leisure
first was built on the backs of slaves and laborers
who presumably had zero scoli or otium. That
is a critical, critical point. This was absolutely
an aristocratic ideal. For the vast majority
of people, the agrarians, the peasants, the slaves,
life was defined by labor. There's no question.
So how does this apply to them? Well, here's
where the history of time gets interesting. Even
for that peasant in the field, the nature of
that work was fundamentally different from our
modern grind. How so? I mean, if you're plowing
a field all day, that's hard work. It is incredibly
hard physical work, but it was task oriented,
not time oriented. What's the difference? In
a task oriented world, the job dictates the time.
You milk the cow because the cow needs milking.
You harvest the wheat because the wheat is ripe.
If it rains, you can't harvest, so you stop.
There's a natural rhythm to it. It's more of
a pulse than a straight unending line. So nature
provides the boundaries, the sun, the seasons.
Yes. The sun goes down, you stop. Winter comes,
you slow down. The historian E .P. Thompson,
who we'll come back to, points out that in pre
-industrial societies, work was incredibly irregular.
You might work 16 hours a day during the harvest,
just a frantic pace. But then you might spend
three days doing very little but repairing tools
and talking to your neighbors. There wasn't this
constant clock -driven pressure. So the concept
of being late. didn't really exist in the same
way. Not in the minute by minute sense. You can't
be late to milking a cow in the same way you
can be late to a 9 .0 a .m. Zoom meeting. The
cow is still there. Okay, so that's the ancient
and agrarian world. Let's move forward. The Middle
Ages, you mentioned monks in the intro. When
I think of monks, I think of isolation, chanting,
that kind of thing. But you're saying they were
actually pioneers of this schedule. They really,
really were. I mean, if you look at Western monasticism,
specifically the rule of St. Benedict from the
6th century, you see one of the first truly institutionalized
attempts to rigorously balance the day. And what
did that balance look like? Was it just all prayer?
No, it was a strict division. The rule prescribes
specific hours for the divine office, which is
prayer, but also specific hours for reading and
study and crucially specific hours for daily
manual labor. So they actually mandated labor.
I thought monks just prayed and read old books.
No, idleness is the enemy of the soul was a core
tenet of the Benedictine rule. They believed
that manual labor was spiritually necessary to
keep you humble and grounded. Okay. But, and
this is the key, they also mandated that labor
stop. When the bell rang for prayer, you put
down the shovel. That was it. No questions. It
was an enforced balance between spiritual duty
and productive tasks. They didn't want monks
burning out from work because they needed energy
for prayer, but they didn't want them lazy either.
It's almost like the first time management self
-help book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective
Monks. In a way, yes, it was a very regulated
life, but outside the monastery in the medieval
towns, time was still very different from how
we see it today. This is where... historians
distinguish between church time and merchant's
time. What's the difference between those two?
Well, church time is cyclical. It's organized
around feasts, fasts, saints' days. You have
the church bells ringing for prayer at certain
times of day. It's a rhythm dictated by the religious
calendar. But as commerce started to rise in
the late Middle Ages, you get the emergence of
merchants' time. Time is money. Exactly. All
of a sudden, merchants need to coordinate. You
have market days, contracts with deadlines, delivery
times. Time becomes a commodity to be measured
and sold. But even then, for the vast majority
of people, labor and rest still varied by your
estate or class. And by the season, there was
no rigid, universal daily clock ticking seconds
away. And this brings us to the villain of our
story. Or at least the turning point where everything
changes. The Industrial Revolution. The moment
the clock takes over. We have to return to E
.P. Thompson here. His analysis, time, work discipline,
and industrial capitalism is. It's just essential
reading on this. His argument is that the factory
changed the very nature of time itself. It shifted
us from that old task orientation to timed labor.
How does that shift actually happen? What's the
mechanism? Think about the economics of it. Before
the factory, a weaver might own their own loom.
They work at home. If they want to get drunk
on Monday and then work double on Tuesday, they
can. Their time is their own. Right. But in a
factory, the employer has invested a massive
amount of capital in machinery. Steam engines,
power looms. These things cost a fortune. And
those machines need to run. They can't just sit
there. Those machines need to run constantly
to be profitable. Idleness in a machine is lost
money. So employers needed to synchronize human
labor to the machine. They use bells and clocks
to discipline labor. Discipline labor. That sounds
so ominous. It was. It was a massive behavioral
modification program on a societal scale. Thomson
documents how this redefined concepts like lateness
and idleness. In an agrarian society, lateness
is a fuzzy concept. In a factory, five minutes
late means the production. line stops and that
costs money so the clock becomes the boss the
clock becomes the moral authority employers actually
laid moral guilt on workers time is money idleness
is sin all those benjamin franklin style proverbs
they had to crush the old natural irregular habits
There's a famous tradition from that time called
St. Monday. St. Monday. I assume that's not a
real saint in the Catholic canon. No, definitely
not. In the early industrial period, workers
like shoemakers, tailors, colliers, they would
get paid on Saturday, drink all day Sunday, and
then just not show up on Monday. They would claim
they were observing St. Monday. The original
three -day weekend. I like it. It was, but it
was erratic. And factory owners absolutely hated
it. They spent decades fighting to eradicate
St. Monday and impose a rigid six -day, 12 to
14 -hour schedule on the workforce. And let's
be clear about those hours. We aren't talking
about a long day at the office answering emails.
We are talking about physically destroying the
human body. We are talking about 14, sometimes
16 hours a day. Children working in mines and
factories. It was a total colonization of life
by work. The boundary was effectively gone. You
slept and you worked. That was it. Which brings
us to the pushback, because human beings can
only take that for so long before they snap,
before they organize. Enter Robert Owen. He was
a Welsh textile manufacturer, so a capitalist,
but he was also a utopian socialist and a social
reformer. In 1817, which is way earlier than
most people think, he coined a slogan that became
the rallying cry for the labor movement worldwide
for the next hundred years. What was the slogan?
Eight hours labor, eight hours recreation, eight
hours rest. It's so simple. It's elegant. It's
a perfect pie chart of the day. It is. It's incredibly
elegant. And notice the word recreation. He didn't
just say time off. He implied recreation, a time
to rebuild yourself, to be human. It's almost
a callback to Aristotle's skull. But it took
a long time to actually get there, didn't it?
I mean, Oman said that in 1817. When did it actually
become real for most people? It was a century
-long fight, bloody strikes, union organizing,
a lot of struggle. But a major turning point
came from a very unlikely source in the early
20th century, Henry Ford. The car guy. The car
guy. In 1914, Ford shocked the entire industrial
world. He reduced shifts in his factories from
nine hours down to eight hours, and he more than
doubled the pay to the now famous $5 day. Now,
was he doing this out of the kindness of his
heart? Was he a secret socialist? Not exactly,
no. Ford was a very shrewd businessman. He realized
that the turnover rate on his assembly lines
was astronomical, something like 370 % a year.
Wow. The work was brutal, repetitive, just soul
-crushing. People would quit constantly. By shortening
the day and raising the pay, he stabilized his
workforce. He cut his turnover costs dramatically.
So this is an efficiency play. Partly. But he
also had a broader economic theory. He realized
that if he wanted to sell mass produced cars,
he needed a mass market. He needed a working
class that had both the money to buy the cars
and crucially, the leisure time to actually use
them. That is the key connection, isn't it? You
can't take a Sunday drive if you're working seven
days a week. Exactly. Ford helped normalize the
idea that shorter shifts could actually lead
to better economic outcomes for everyone, what
was called the economy of high wages. And then
following World War I, this started to get codified
internationally. The International Labor Organization,
the ILO, was founded, and their very first convention
back in 1919 set the standard. Eight hours a
day, 48 hours a week. And in the U .S., this
eventually becomes law with the Fair Labor Standards
Act, right? The FLSA. Yes, the FLSA of 1938.
This is a monumental piece of legislation. It
established the federal minimum wage. But for
our purposes, it established the 40 -hour workweek
as the national standard. But it didn't ban working
more than 40 hours, did it? Because I know plenty
of people who work way more than that. No, and
that's the cleverness of the mechanism. It didn't
forbid long hours. It just made them expensive
for the employer. It mandated premium pay time
and a half for any hours worked over 40. So the
logic was we are going to make it painful for
the employer to overwork you. A financial disincentive.
Correct. The goal was to discourage long weeks
and, in the context of the Great Depression,
to spread the available work among more people.
The logic was if it's cheaper to hire a second
person than to pay one person overtime, you'll
hire the second person. So by 1940, we sort of
have it. The modern structure is in place. We
have the clock. We have the hour day. We have
the weekend. Balance is structurally there, at
least on paper. On paper, yes. But fast forward
to the late 20th century. And it feels like the
wheels start falling off again. This is where
we see what's called the sociological turn. The
conversation moves away from just arguing about
hours worked and starts looking at the social
and especially the gender dynamics of those hours.
And one of the biggest voices here is Juliet
Shore with The Overworked American. Yes, that
book came out in 1992 and it was a bombshell.
Shore presented a ton of data showing that working
hours in the U .S. had actually risen significantly
over the previous decades, despite productivity
going through the roof. That's the paradox, isn't
it? Yeah. Technology was supposed to save us
time. We have dishwashers. We have computers.
We have email. We should be working 15 -hour
weeks by now, as John Maynard Keynes famously
predicted back in the 30s. We should be. So why
did Shore say we were working more, not less?
She pointed to a combination of cultural and
economic pressures, what she called the cycle
of work and spend. We worked more to buy more.
The standard of living expectations just kept
rising. We wanted the bigger house, the second
car, the nicer clothes, the international vacation.
So we traded that potential leisure time for
more consumption. We bought the really nice car,
but now we have to work constantly to make the
payments on the car, so we don't actually have
any time to drive the car. It's the hamster wheel.
And while Shore was looking at the economic pressure
to work more, Arlie Russell Hochschild was looking
at the domestic pressure. Her book, The Second
Shift, is absolutely foundational here. I've
heard this term, the second shift. This is about
what happens when women get home from their paid
job. Yes, exactly. As women entered the workforce
in massive numbers in the 70s and 80s, the domestic
labor, the cooking, the cleaning, the child care,
the emotional labor of running a household, it
didn't just disappear. Right. And crucially,
men didn't pick it up at the same rate. So the
whole contract to the 40 -hour week was basically
broken. It was a flawed premise. The 40 -hour
week was designed for a man with a wife at home
doing all of that unpaid labor. Once you have
two people working, that domestic labor still
has to happen. Hochschild's research documented
that women were effectively working a full shift
at the office and then coming home to work a
second shift of unpaid care work. She calculated
it was roughly an extra month of 24 hour days
per year. An entire extra month of work. So for
women, work life balance was basically a myth.
It was just work. work balance in many ways yes
and hochschild followed this up with another
incredible book called the time mine and this
one had a really provocative almost counter -incuitive
thesis she argued that for many people work and
home had flipped roles what do you mean they'd
flipped she observed that the workplace had for
many become a place of social connection clear
goals and positive recognition you finish a project
someone says good job you get a coffee with a
colleague it's structured and rewarding okay
meanwhile home hit That is... Devastatingly relatable
for a lot of parents, I'm sure. Work is where
you get to drink your coffee while it's still
hot. Exactly. It's the haven theory turned completely
upside down. Work becomes the haven from the
chaos of home. And this growing recognition of
the care burden led to some legislative attempts
to help out. In the U .S., we got the FMLA, the
Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. Right,
which gives you 12 weeks of leave. And this is
a huge but. But it is unpaid. That is the critical
limitation. It protects your job. You can't be
fired for having a baby or caring for a sick
parent, but it doesn't protect your income, which
means for millions of people, it's not a real
option. Compare that to something like the Small
Necessities Leave Act in Massachusetts, which
allows 24 hours of unpaid leave for things like
parent -teacher conferences or a kid's doctor
appointments. These are attempts to patch the
holes in the system, but they are still relying
on the employee to take the financial hit. And
then, as if the second shift and the time bind
weren't enough to deal with, We enter the 21st
century and we get the digital leash. Smartphone,
the laptop, high speed internet everywhere. And
then the ultimate game changer. The COVID -19
pandemic. The pandemic was a massive accelerant.
It forced this huge global experiment in remote
and hybrid work. And reports from the ILO and
the OECD found that while this offered new opportunities
for flexibility, it created a massive risk of
hidden overtime. Hidden overtime. I know that
feeling. That's answering emails while you're
making dinner. That's finishing a slide deck
on a Sunday morning just because you can. It's
the total blurring of boundaries. When your office
is your kitchen table, you are never really at
work, but you are also never really at home.
You're in this liminal state of constant potential
availability. Yes. And this has led to a really
interesting legal counter movement, specifically
in Europe. The right to disconnect. I love the
sound of this. It sounds like a fundamental civil
right. It effectively is in some places. It really
started in France with the Loi Travaille in 2016.
It introduced the Droit à la Diconnexion. My
French is terrible, but that sounds exactly like.
Right to disconnect. You got it. It requires
employers, specifically in larger companies,
to negotiate rules with their staff to limit
after hours communication. It's not a blanket
ban on sending an email, but it forces the conversation.
It says we must agree on when work officially
stops. And Spain followed suit with this. Yes.
In 2018, Spain created a statutory right to digital
disconnection. It basically says you have a legal
right not to answer that email or that Slack
message outside of your established working hours.
That is just wild. think about from a U .S. perspective.
A legal right to ignore your boss on a Saturday.
It signals a societal recognition that the technology
is inherently invasive. It treats the smartphone
as a potential intruder in the private sphere
of the home. The UK and the EU are also pushing
really hard on flexible working rights. In the
UK, as of 2024, the right to request flexible
working is a day one entitlement. So you don't
have to earn it over years of service. You can
ask for it immediately. Correct. And then there
is the most ambitious experiment of all, the
four day work week. We all saw the headline.
about that big UK pilot in 2022. It was huge.
It was a massive trial with the University of
Cambridge involved in the research, and the results
were fascinating. They found that moving to a
four -day week with no cut in pay dramatically
reduced burnout and stress. Okay, that makes
sense. It also lowered turnover. But crucially
for the skeptics company, revenue remained stable
or even improved slightly. Stable revenue with
20 % less time. That goes right back to the productivity
paradox. We are wasting a lot of time just pretending
to work. or being present. Or we're just so exhausted
by the fifth day that we aren't working efficiently
anyway. If you are burned out, you make mistakes,
you work slower. The trial showed that a rested,
focused workforce can get the same amount done
in less time. And did the companies stick with
it? Most of them did. The vast majority of firms
in that trial decided to keep the four -day week
permanently after the pilot ended. It suggests
we might be on the cusp of another Robert Owen
moment, another fundamental redefinition of the
standard work week. I want to pivot now. We've
done the history. We've done the laws. But I
want to get into the head. I want to get into
the psychology of this. Why does it feel so hard?
Even if I have a standard nine -to -five job,
why do I feel so torn all the time? You have
some theoretical frameworks that explain this
feeling. Yes. And to understand the feeling of
being torn, we can talk about the boundary border
spectrum. But the theory that I think resonates
most powerfully and the one that really made
me go, aha, when I first read it, is the concept
of greedy institutions. Greedy institutions.
I love that term. It sounds sinister. Who came
up with that? It comes from the sociologist Louis
A. Koser, and he defined a greedy institution
as any institution that demands total commitment
and loyalty from its members. Total commitment.
Yes. It actively discourages you from being involved
elsewhere. It wants to build a wall around you
and absorb your entire identity. So like a cult
or something. A cult is a classic extreme example
or a religious order like a monastery. But Koser
also included things like the military, elite
sports. teams, academia, and senior management
and corporations. Jobs that own you. Jobs that
own you. They want your soul, not just your time.
They use language like, we're a family here,
or we need people with passion. They try to erase
the line between your personal identity and your
job title. Okay, so the modern workplace, especially
in certain fields, is a greedy institution. But
here is the absolutely crucial twist for our
conversation. The family can also be a greedy
institution. Oh, absolutely. Especially today,
I can see that. Right. If you look at the culture
of intensive parenting that has developed in
the last 30 years, this idea that you need to
be constantly optimizing your child's life, driving
them to every activity, helping with every piece
of homework, ensuring they have every advantage.
The modern family has become just as demanding
of total loyalty as the most demanding workplace.
So the modern conflict is that we are trapped
between two greedy institutions. Exactly. The
modern workplace wants 100 percent of you. Modern
family wants 100 percent of you. And the math
doesn't work. You don't have 200%. You do not.
And when you are squeezed between two greedy
forces, like a mother who is also a soldier or
a PhD student who's also a parent or just a regular
corporate employee with kids, the conflict intensifies
to an unbearable degree. You feel guilty when
you are at work because you feel you are failing
your family. You feel guilty when you are with
your family because you feel you are failing
at work. Because both sides are telling you that
anything less than 100 % commitment is a betrayal.
Precisely. A 2020 LinkedIn analysis that's in
our sources showed that employees with poor work
-life balance, those caught in this greedy trap,
are 4 .4 times more likely to report being burned
out. It isn't just that they're tired, it's that
they are being psychologically torn apart by
these conflicting loyalties. That makes so much
sense. It's not just, I'm busy, it's... I'm failing
everyone all the time. Right. And there are other
theories about how we try to handle this. There's
compensation theory, which was developed by Piotrkowski
in the late 70s. It suggests we look to one domain
to fix what's wrong with the other. If my work
is boring and unfulfilling, I need my home life
to be thrilling and meaningful. Or going back
to Hochschild's time bind, if home is chaotic
and stressful, I need work to be calm and orderly.
Exactly. And then there's the opposite idea,
segmentation theory, which is the belief that
work and family are, or at least... should be
totally separate domains that don't influence
each other this is the leave your problems at
the door mentality which sounds nice in theory
but in a world where my boss texts me at dinner
segmentation is dead In a digital world, segmentation
is a fantasy. The boundaries are porous by design
now. We can't pretend they're airtight compartments
anymore. It's interesting to look back at the
theory of structural functionalism from a historical
perspective. This was the mid -20th century idea
that justified the separation, right? Yes. This
is the old historical theoretical basis for these
separate spheres ideology. The theory argued
that households and society work best when there's
a clear division of labor. Men do the instrumental
tasks, earning money, being out in the world,
and women do the expressive, work -nurturing
emotional support, running the home. Which we
now recognize as being incredibly limiting and
also just factually wrong for a lot of history,
especially for working -class families where
women have always worked. Exactly. It was a theory
that justified a very specific historical moment,
the 1950s American suburban ideal, but it doesn't
map onto the reality of modern dual -income households,
single parents, or same - sex couples. It's an
outdated map for a completely new territory.
So we have all this conflict. We have greedy
institutions fighting over our souls. Is it all
bad news? Is there any good news in any of this
research? There is. This is where researchers
differentiate between work -family conflict,
which we've been talking a lot about, and work
-family enrichment. Okay, let's do the bad news
first so we can end on a high note. What are
the specific types of conflict that the research
identifies? Greenhouse and Butel. Two major researchers
in this field identified three specific sources
of conflict. The first is the most obvious. Time
-based conflict. Physically, you cannot be in
two places at once. Simple physics. Right. I
can't be at the board meeting and the school
play at the same time. Right. The second is strain
-based conflict. This is where the stress from
one role drains your energy so you perform poorly
in the other. You had a terrible stressful day
at work. Your cortisol is spiked so you come
home and you're short -tempered and irritable
with your partner and kids. Or the reverse. You
are up all night with a crying baby so the next
day you're exhausted and you make a critical
mistake on a spreadsheet. at work. Exactly. The
strain transfers across the boundary. But the
third one is the most fascinating to me. Behavior
based conflict. This happens when the behavior
that is required for success in one role directly
fights with the behavior required in the other.
Can you give me an example of that? OK. Imagine
you're a trial lawyer or a high stakes corporate
negotiator. To succeed in that role, you might
need to be aggressive, unyielding, objective,
maybe even a bit cold. Emotional detachment is
a professional asset. Right. But if you bring
that exact behavior home to your toddler who
just fell down or to your spouse who needs emotional
support, it's a complete disaster. You have to
code switch. You have to change persona. You
have to code switch constantly. You have to take
off the lawyer armor before you walk in the front
door. And that code switching is exhausting.
It takes a huge amount of mental energy. to change
your entire personality at 6 0 p .m. every day.
That explains the decompression time people need
after work, that commute time, or just sitting
in the car for 10 minutes. You need a minute
to switch characters. Exactly. But now for the
good news. Work family enrichment. This is the
flip side. It's the idea that participation in
one role can actually generate resources and
skills that help you in the other. So how does
work help family besides the obvious, you know,
the paycheck? Well, there's skills transfer.
Maybe you learn project management skills at
work that help you organize a chaotic household.
Maybe you take a conflict resolution course for
your job that helps you handle arguments with
your teenager better. OK, that makes sense. Or
even simpler, success at work can give you a
sense of self -efficacy and confidence that makes
you a happier, more patient, more engaged parent.
And the reverse. How can family help your work
life? Oh, absolutely. The emotional support you
get from your family can be a powerful buffer
against workplace stress. If your boss yells
at you, but you go home to a supportive partner
who listens. You bounce back faster. You're more
resilient. Right. And frankly, having a family
can give you perspective. It's just a job perspective.
Right. You realize that the quarterly report
isn't actually life or death because you have
this other life that matters so much more. And
that perspective can actually make you a better
leader because you're less reactive, less anxious
about small setbacks. So if we want more of that
enrichment and less of the conflict, what do
we do? Is it all just up to me to be better at
yoga and time management? and code switching?
No. And I want to be very, very clear on this.
Individual solutions to structural problems usually
fail. The research is overwhelming that organizational
support is crucial. It's not just about having
a policy written down in the HR handbook somewhere.
It's about active supervisor support. The manager
matters a lot. The manager is the gatekeeper
to balance. Studies show that specific supportive
behaviors from a direct supervisor correlate
directly with lower employee conflict and stress.
If your boss says, I see you have a dentist appointment
on your calendar. Go take care of it. Don't worry
about it. That reduces strain massively. If your
boss says, why weren't you online at 2, 6 p .m.?
That increases strain. It's that simple. And
what about coworkers? Does that matter too? Yes.
Informal coworker support is huge. Just having
someone who will say, hey, I'll cover for you.
Go pick up your kid. Or just, how is your mom
doing after her surgery? That social resource
creates a buffer against burnout. At the end
of the day, we're social animals. We need to
feel that the tribe at work has our back. So
we've covered a massive amount of ground here.
We've gone from the Greek concept of skole all
the way to the medieval bells, to the factory
clock, and now to the greedy institutions of
the 21st century. It's a long and winding journey
of humanity just trying to figure out how to
live a good life. If we have to summarize the
big takeaway from all this, what is it? I think
the summary is that work -life balance isn't
a static thing you achieve, like finishing a
marathon and then you're done. It's not a destination
you arrive at. It is a constant dynamic process
of boundary management. And historically, every
time the nature of work changes from the field
to the factory, from the factory to the office,
from the office to the cloud, we have to renegotiate
those boundaries all over again. And right now
we are in the middle of a massive renegotiation
because of technology. Exactly. We are trying
to apply factory error rules like the eight hour
day to a digital reality where work can happen
anywhere, anytime. The old tree bees don't work
anymore. Which brings us to our final thought.
We always like to leave the listener with something
to chew on. OK, so here is what I'm thinking
about. We talked about. the right to disconnect
laws in Europe. Right. And we talked about Lewis
Kosar's theory of greedy institutions. If work
and life are indeed two greedy institutions that
will naturally, by their very nature, devour
as much of our time and energy and loyalty as
we let them, can we actually solve this individually?
Oh, that's the question. Can I just discipline
my way to balance? Can I have enough willpower
to turn off my phone? Or do we need societal
rules like the French law, like the four day
work week to force the boundaries back into place
for everyone? Because if you are just one person
trying to hold back these two greedy giants on
your own, you are almost certainly going to lose.
Maybe we aren't managing a personal balance.
Maybe what we're really doing is negotiating
a treaty between two warring nations. And usually
treaties require governments and laws and collective
agreements, not just individual good intentions.
That is a powerful thought. Are you a diplomat
negotiating a treaty or are you just a casualty
in the war between work and life? Something to
think about next time you reach for your work
phone at 9 .00 p .m. Indeed. Thank you so much
for this deep dive. I feel, ironically, I feel
like I should go take a break now. A little obium
would be good for you. A little odium. Thanks
for listening, everyone. We'll see you on the
next deep dive.