Work-Life Balance is a Figment of Our Imagination

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Work-life balance is a figment of our imagination. So let’s stop chasing it and start living.

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We can be professional high-flyers, domestic goddesses, and doting matriarchs all at the same time. That’s what believers of the mystical work-life balance say.

But we’re more likely to lure Aladdin’s genie out of the kettle in the morning to grant us it as a wish than ever achieve it ourselves. Both are equally elusive. If we stopped frantically trying to juggle everything, we’d actually feel happier and content. So why are we so obsessed with the idea of a work-life balance?

Since childhood our overactive imaginations have plucked fairy tales out of storybooks and created a utopic vision of life. But this has created an infinite pursuit of fictional perfection, and set us up for a life forever tainted by feelings of inadequacy.

There are life coaches, self-help books, apps, courses, and luxury retreats preying on our weaknesses. An entire industry is thriving off of our dreams for professional success and personal fulfilment.

In the UK, life coaches need not have any formal qualifications to dish out their supposedly life-changing advice. We could all declare ourselves trendy life coaches, and charge anywhere from £30 to £300 per hour for our transformational services.

Undoubtedly there are some for whom the songs of praise are legitimate. But some of these self-proclaimed experts have exceptional talents; one of the UK’s leading celebrity life coaches claims that when people work with them, “miracles occur”. Either Jesus has returned to Earth, they belong to the magic circle, or they are part of a completely unregulated industry - the latter is the only truth.

No one can be blamed for buying into this. The promise of a quick fix to our work-life problem is deeply alluring, but our life happiness shouldn’t be a tradable commodity, and there certainly isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. If any other industry were as exploitative it would have Trading Standards knocking on its door.

Half the battle is successfully boarding a London-bound train in the morning, let alone trying to practice mindfulness whilst commuting. Most of the time the only available incense stick is an unsavoury sweaty armpit being waved in front of our face.

But the challenge of juggling work and life goes far beyond a bunch of charlatans in disguise making biblical-esque proclamations. We can’t have a work-life balance because the imbalance is already fixed for us, and no amount of self-help techniques will be able to rectify that.

Women’s incomes are lower than men, even if we do the same jobs. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, female employees still earn 18 per cent less than men on average, irrespective of whether they have children.

Depending on this year’s wage gap, women will effectively stop earning around 51 days before the end of the year, as was the case in 2016. Given the current rate of progress, it is estimated that it will take more than 60 years before gender parity is realised in the UK. We might as well stop trying to progress our careers through further education if our efforts are as useless as a boiled egg cosy.

Last year one Kent mother attracted tabloid attention for controversially saying she would rather her daughter “opt for a rich man over a university degree”. The feminazis came out in full force, defensive over liberation, but she didn’t betray the sisterhood. It is telling when our concerns over work-life balance haven’t changed since flares and flower power were in fashion. On the 6 March 1971, 4,000 second-wave feminists took to the streets of London for the first women’s liberation march, protesting against the same issues we face today.

London remains the most expensive place in the UK for childcare, with it costing on average £159 per week to send a toddler below the age of two to nursery part time - a third more expensive than it was five years ago. Some women are content with domesticity; others are forced to be stay-at-home mothers because of the prohibitive costs of childcare in the capital. But both are labelled old fashioned or anti-feminist. At the same time career-savvy women are slated for being over-ambitious, or - God forbid - childless and unfeminine.

How can we be truly happy with our work-life balance if birthing a tot defines our existence? During the contest for Conservative party leadership last July, our Prime Minister Theresa May was pitied for being childless by her then rival Andrea Leadsom. And women who try to balance work and life, like the Italian Member for European Parliament Licia Ronzulli, who in 2010 took her baby to a European Parliament session as a political statement, are hounded for being gaga.

This month is bookended by International Women’s Day and Mother’s Day, making it a true celebration of women and talking point for female issues. But even the United Nations can’t find a woman who can juggle it all. Last October the comic-book heroine Wonder Woman was appointed as ambassador for female empowerment and gender equality.

Heck, if the best example of female empowerment is a bustier-wearing fictitious character with magic superpowers, gravity-defying elevated breasts and no obvious offspring, then there isn’t much hope left for us mere mortals.

Superficially, it seems defeatist and bleak to just accept that the scales will always be tipped towards either work or life. But we will find greater happiness by making the most of what we can manage, rather than falling into a spiral of never ending discontent over what we can’t change.

#Rosanna #Opinion