The decline of the great religions mean that there are fewer and fewer 'universal truths' in our world today, and
what few pretenders there are lack the prestige and following of yesteryear's
great maxims.
But if there is a maxim today worthy of the 'universal
truth' status, it surely must be the widely celebrated notion of 'work-life
balance'.
We are supposed to 'do what we love' and to prevent
the burdens of the workplace from intruding into our 'personal lives'. To leave
work behind and not to carry it 'home'. To nurture relationships that are
meaningful and deep, which by definition must be external to our daily labours,
and uncontaminated by the economic forces that rule our professional lives.
People complain of being 'burnt out', and workaholics
are looked upon with a mixture of disdain and pity, consigned to statistics of
psychiatric health and psychological well-being. Is this some form of modern conceit? After all, in
those cultures where written records make it easy to trace the origin of names,
we find that 'what one did for a living', 'one's place in life' and 'one's
purpose for living' were often conflated and deliberately blurred. Hence such
names as 'Hunter', 'Baker', 'Falconer', 'Brewer/Brew' etc.
And yet, it is curiously in Marxism, that most
post-industrially modern of creeds, that we find the most sustained assault on
the notion that 'work' can be separated from 'life'. As Erich Fromm extracts
from a summary of Marx's work: "History is....nothing but the
self-creation of man through the process of his work and his production."
The ideals expressed in such maxims as: "dignity
in labour", and "essence through human production" etc. lies
within the very bedrock of all the materialist philosophies that accept human
centricity in their conception of the world. Labour maketh the man.
There are of course perversions, such as the Nazi
taunt that "work makes free". But the fundamental principle
penetrates very deep into any logic that seeks to separate man from the other
species.
Which is why even in the supernatural creeds, such as
the great Monotheisms, we learn that God worked for six days and on the seventh
day, 'rested'. The proportion is very clear: work is pre-eminent. Man, made in
the image of deities, must also respect this proportion, and must mark the
Sabbath not in the glorification of 'rest', but to give full meaning to WORK.
In fact, in the Christian tradition, the Christ appears to condone the
extension of labour into the Sabbath itself, strenuously refusing to chastise
the Apostles that performed a harvest of grain on the holy day of rest, in
defiance of the teachers of the Law.
And when you extend the idea of labour into the
broader concepts of 'vocation' and 'duty', one finds in the Christian
eschatology that the Angels and other divine essences 'worship forever' before
the throne of the Monotheistic Deity. Worship being their vocation, their
"life's work", they are called upon to do it without ceasing, to work
incessantly.
Perhaps, then, a case can be made for 'fusing work
into life', in much the same way that family law in contemporary times appear
to have done for 'stay at home moms' and in its reinterpretation of domestic
chores. Nowadays, child-rearing, home-tending, and civic duty, have all
benefited from such 'reinterpretation', notwithstanding the capitalist surge in
the production of so-called 'labour-saving' devices and advanced democracy's
apathy-inducing side-effects.
Witness therefore not only the transformation of the
home into a theater of labour-negotiation, but also, even more intriguingly,
the emergence of full-time politicians and civic activists, some of whom now
find sufficient means to live off entirely on what were once considered 'mere
passions'.
Which leads to the heart of my concern: the perverse,
in my view, morality that the operation of passion works solely in one direction:
you must turn into a vocation that which you love already. It seems manifest by
the record of contemporary lives that, very often, the key to peace of mind is
to COME TO LOVE THAT WHICH YOU MUST DO. That which is your duty and vocation.
For your means of livelihood must become your "life's work".
To my mind, by no means the sharpest that has
contended with this subject, falling in love with your duty is a performance.
It requires skill. Skill that must be acquired, through daily practice and
perseverance. But, above all, it requires a mind-shift. And that mindshift is
the centralisation of work in one's life. Work must define the being.
The artificial distinctions that have been erected by
barefaced gurus have now come to a head in the religious vocations. Some people
worry that other people earnestly work themselves into 'religious ministry'
without a 'calling', wrongly construing the labour that attends the
organisation of a religious mission as non-labour, and thus suffering
unnecessary indignation when they discover that such activity is as much labour
as any other form of work, to be harnessed by all who will to work.
That there are pastors and Imams, undercover
journalists and spies, who hate their jobs as much as the next janitor or white-collar
clerk is a notion unthinkable to those burdened with these delusions. To them,
work is burdensome and a calling is sweet. I hate to break it to these timorous
souls: here is the truth: all work is work, and there is no such thing as a
distinction between vocations that are based on a calling and labour
predominantly motivated, via cultural referents, by wage and service.
Understanding the preceding should open one's eye to
the harsh reality of the human condition: we must PRODUCE OUR ENVIRONMENT, and
this production is the day to day NATURE OF OUR VERY BEING. From the time we
wake up till we drop, we are engaged in a constant pushback to re-orient our
environment. The returns we get are calibrated by the success of this
endeavour, and where those returns are 'wages' it simply means that the
struggle we are engaged with has been codified enough to be widely performed,
and through the various efficiencies of aggregation to generate wealth, and
thus transform the environment at a much greater scale.
One may retreat from this types of aggregation. But
one cannot escape the incessant throbbing of work in search of some elusive
notion of happiness, unbound from the pressure of the environment, which is
one's unending duty to produce. This is a grand delusion. Work stares into your
soul, revealing your true worth.
The escape which you seek is the escape from the *MYTH
of Work-Life Balance* into the universal truth of Work-Life Fusion.
Bright Simons is the Ghanaian social innovator, entrepreneur,
writer and researcher affiliated with IMANI Centre for Policy and Education. He is the president of mpedigree
network. Author Permission sought to publish this article which was originally posted on
his facebook on 27th September, 2015
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