Opinion
As a millennial professional, over the past 15 years I have been inundated with articles, seminars, and tips on how to master work-life balance. Even when I was in the US Army as a senior leader, I was lectured and told to promote this concept as a way to ensure we didn’t burn ourselves and our people.
At its core, the idea of work-life balance is not new; it’s not even a creation of my generation. Work-life balance has been around since the ancient Stoics.
Seneca once wrote:
“We need to give relaxation to the mind. It will wake up improved and sharper after a good break. Just as rich fields must not be forced…so constant work on the anvil shatters the strength of the mind.”
But the idea of perfect balance has always been a unicorn, something that can never be fully achieved. Unfortunately, the younger professionals among us are cracking up at the reality of what work-life balance means.
Welcome to reality
TikTok is full of Gen Z professionals crying into their camera phones about the immense, unyielding pressure they feel living in the real world. Having to get a job, pay bills, manage your life, and do it all over again day after day is something most of them didn’t know was part of adult life.
Many of these young professionals are women, and I can’t help but wonder whether they seem more likely to pour out their overly dramatic feelings in front of the camera because of our innate biological propensity for expressive emotion or because of the usual unrealistic images of young life adult female professional they have been inundated with. As a work-from-home professional, I’m always finding articles and pictures on social media of women seemingly just like me looking fabulous in their perfectly coiffed and soft-looking home offices, wearing chic loungewear and looking perfectly rested.
The reality of my professional life is very different from that face. I often wear professional clothes and juggle the needs of my children and home life with online meetings and deadlines in an office that, while clean and organized, doesn’t feel like a spa waiting room.
It’s also important to note that I didn’t enter adulthood with a remote job. I spent two decades right out of high school working in the military, where I had to get up early, physically travel to a location to work, and, more often than not, get home very late.
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This wasn’t a lifestyle I thought was strange; in fact, it seemed very normal to me… because it was and still is. Being an adult with a job is supposed to take a lot of time.
Being an adult is tiring
The young woman in the TikTok video below is really grappling with the idea of a 40-hour work week. She says:
“Why do I have to work 40 hours a week just so I can have a place to live?”
This question alone is great because, since the dawn of work, it has been necessary to work in some capacity for a certain period of time in order to afford shelter. Now, as she illustrates in her video, rent is ridiculously high in every city compared to when I was a young professional.
Buying a house right out of college is understandably not a priority for many Zoomers, as it wasn’t for me either, in addition to the fact that it’s virtually unattainable for anyone to buy a house at this point, regardless of generation. However, his other arguments are just as ridiculous, if not more so.
She continues complaining:
“Just working makes me so exhausted I don’t even have time.”
I can relate to that feeling. I worked an average of 72 hours a week or 12 hours a day while in the military for twenty years, and I can’t remember a day I didn’t come home from work exhausted.
Now I work 40 hours a week or 8 hours a day. My level of exhaustion has significantly decreased compared to when I was in uniform.
However, I feel a sense of mental strain at the end of the day. That’s because I’ve been there workingand working requires effort.
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Welcome to the club
The young lady continues explaining that she will come down at 5.30 pm and that:
“I’m so tired that, like, everything I have to do outside of work then I just push it into the weekend and I’m, like, I’m just too tired to do it after work.”
I’ll be generous with my guess here that what he “needs” to do outside of work are things like do laundry, clean the house, and maybe go to night school to get a certification or degree. However, I bet he’s referring more to things like exploring his inner child through tantric goat yoga and addressing his inner biases through his extensive journaling habit.
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She continues:
“I’ll wait until Saturday, so then I’ll end up with so much to do over the weekend that I’ll end up having to split it into two days. So I have to do things on both Saturday and Sunday!”
Imagine if this woman had procreated! Saturday and Sunday are the perfect times to catch up on all the personal and family things you can’t do during the week.
This is nothing new to you, darling; this is called adulthood.
Not made for this
This poor young soul, through tears, says:
“So I don’t have a day off. I don’t have a day to relax. I can’t decompress.
I can’t imagine having an entire day to “relax”. I’m happy if I have an hour.
She then states:
“So it’s really like constantly working seven days a week.”
No it is not. If you want to experience what it’s like to consistently work seven days a week, find your local military recruiter and sign up.
What you are experiencing is a very typical working operational rhythm. But it is the following line that illustrates his self-awareness to his credit:
“I’m not made for this.”
The blame lies largely with her parents, teachers, professors, and the cultural lens she was exposed to via social media. Real life is demanding, work is exhausting, and balance isn’t what she was taught.
Balancing work and life is exactly what he described. You spend 40 hours a week working to have the funds and benefits to do life things like improve yourself professionally and physically and do the mundane chores of life during all the other hours of the week.
It’s not about having equal or distributed times the way you want. Do what the rest of us have done and continue to do… wake up earlier, learn to prioritize and multitask, and get a bad caffeine habit to give you an early evening boost.
Welcome to adulthood, darling; It’s hard because it should be. Now stop crying and get back to work.
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