Fed Up With Work-life Balance: What You Would Call It?

Everyone knows what is the "work-life balance" and how it does work. If work-life balance were a product and

If work-life balance were a product and I were trying to understand the marketing approach behind it, I would say it’s aspirational,

And that’s what I don’t like about it.

“Balance” offers that hint of realism, because we recognize that, in everyday life, balance is something that results from a tug of war with strong opposing forces.

But in the phrase “work-life balance,” we don’t get the vibe of being always caught in the precarious act of balancing, of tipping over to one side or the other as we constantly struggle to regain that enviable equilibrium.

On the contrary, the “balance” in this term is very much a noun, a fixed goal that we talk about “achieving,” a static milestone that we can one day hope to reach.

In my experience as a product marketer in high tech, a parent of four, and a human whose sometimes tenuous grip on sanity depends on having moments of being that are not defined by either work or family, I don’t think that is how work-life “balance” actually, you know, works. In life.

In the real world, work and life are endlessly intertwined strands— the DNA of our daily existence.

They don’t march in perfectly orchestrated lockstep. They shove each other, they drag you in at least two or three different directions, and, if you’re lucky, they may barely coexist for moments in time before pulling apart again as they inevitably must.

By naming only the aspirational (and perhaps imaginary) objective, the Fakebook term of art that is “work-life balance,” we’re left bereft of the language with which to talk about the actual thing itself as it manifests in the day-to-day.

If I were naming this product as it is and not as an ideal that some marketer thought I would want to reach, I would go for something less static, more very and chaotic.

I’ve heard “work-life juggling” suggested, but I don’t love that either, because I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t keep all the balls in the air all the time. (I’ve already confessed to being human, after all.)

“Work-life muddle” comes closer, or “work-life jumble.”

But I think my vote has to go to “work-life scramble.”

“Scramble,” as in the thing you do to eggs when you need to get dinner ready in five minutes.

“Scramble,” as in making one’s way “quickly or awkwardly up a steep slope or over rough ground by using one’s hands as well as one’s feet.”

“Scramble,” as in “a disordered mixture of things.”

This sounds good to me.