Back in the early 1980s, when I started researching the field of careers, the notion of “work-life balance” was decidedly embryonic. It certainly had almost no resonance among women, who were still expected to work both at work and at home. Now it’s an acknowledged part of the zeitgeist and central to how we arrange our lives.
Look at investment bank JP Morgan Chase’s recent announcement of its Pencils Down initiative, which encourages its young bankers to take off every weekend unless they’re involved in a “live deal.” Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Carlos Hernandez, the company’s head of global banking, described the scheme as “realistic to what this generation wants.”
Stories highlighting the intensity of corporate life are familiar, and it’s a relief that some organizations are starting to take heed. It was the death of Moritz Erhardt, an intern at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, that first drove the banking industry as a whole to confront its workaholic zeal. Although exhaustion from work could not definitely be linked to his death, the fact that it followed a 72-hour shift led to calls to reassess the demands of banking culture.
Forget Balance
Yet there’s reason to believe such innovations, however well-intentioned, are innately doomed. The problem is that the very idea of work-life balance suggests a neatly divisible whole that we can split as we wish. The truth is that life simply isn’t like that.
Why? Because stuff happens. There may well be people whose existence remains miraculously untroubled by random and unforeseen events, but for everyone else the supposedly competing spheres of work and life intrude on each other almost all the time.
