[fallingfrog]

They wouldn't call it work/life balance if work was really part of your life. It's dead time, lost time. I've always felt that way anyhow. You can convince yourself otherwise maybe, if you're a musician or something. For most people though that's the truth of it.

[mikekchar]

I think you have it the other way around. People for whom work is dead, lost time really need to get their work/life balance sorted out. If you view work as part of your life, then it's a much less binary view of prioritisation. This doesn't mean that you shouldn't prioritise. It just means that the prioritisation is more nuanced than: do what I don't like for 8 hours and then do what I do like for the rest of the day.

In my way of thinking, there are a lot of things you have to do in your day that you may not really want to do. For example, you've got to brush your teeth. I don't have a "brush my teeth"/life balance. I brush my teeth because I want my teeth brushed. Sometimes I enjoy brushing my teeth. Spending some time to look after myself can be very rewarding. Most of the time, I'm thinking about my other priorities.

The same goes for cleaning the house, doing your dishes, doing your laundry, cooking, doing yard work, visiting your family, washing your car, fixing things around the house, etc, etc. At various times, those tasks are the highest priority even though you might not want to do them. You still have to do them. But people who find a way to enjoy at least some of those tasks are going to be a lot happier overall than people who don't.

I think you are right that for most people that the binary point of view is the truth of it, but to be perfectly frank, for most people their only free time is being taken up by watching people being nasty to each other on reality TV shows. Just because it is common, doesn't mean it's a good idea.

You've got 8 hours of your day being taken up by work. You've got lunch at work. You've got your commute. You've got getting ready for work. You've got unwinding from the stress of work. That's a crap load of your life! You can waste it being miserable if you like, but I really don't recommend it.

In any job there is something you can find to enjoy. You may not enjoy it every single day, but the more you succeed in getting into the enjoyment zone, the better your life is going to be. Or at least, that's the way I look at it.

[fallingfrog]

Well I think my point is that it feels completely different when it's self directed. I built a shed this summer with my brothers- and it didn't feel anything like work does- it felt joyful, playful. I get some of the same feelings when I'm working on my own programming projects. But at work? No, I'm creating something for someone else, to make someone else richer, and if I left tomorrow nobody would care.

You might be able fool yourself for a while with the power of positive thinking but a happy servant is still a servant.

[mikekchar]

A happy servant is happier than a sad servant. Being happy or sad does not change your status as a servant. Don't cut off your nose to spite your face, is all I'm trying to say.

[fallingfrog]

Fair enough

[jonstaab]

Sounds like you might want to move on. I've been at kinda crappy startups for 4 years now, not being paid much and working hard. But like, Idaho hard. 55ish max hours a week. And I've stuck to it because I have so much agency. I live a very modest life, but work flexible hours from home, self-direct my work, make my own decisions. There are things I miss (e.g. working with other engineers), but the work is valuable, meaningful, and mine. I like it and from what people are saying in this thread I seem to have it made.

I understand it's not always simple to make the change (which is why I've kept my standard of living relatively low on purpose). But it can be done, there are places way out in the sticks that need good talent, and even if you're not architecting realtime distributed systems there can be interesting projects on tiny teams.

[YinglingLight]

"The more responsibility you take on, the more meaning your life has."

As a developer, you would do well to seek out the feedback from users/the impact your work has. Allow yourself to feel responsible for that impact. Taking ownership will make you feel more engaged than the dopamine hits of 'closing JIRA tickets'.

[chaosbutters]

Relevant?

"Rick, the only connection between your unquestionable intelligence and the sickness destroying your family is that everyone in your family, you included, use intelligence to justify sickness. You seem to alternate between viewing your own mind as an unstoppable force and as an inescapable curse. And I think it's because the only truly unapproachable concept for you is that it's your mind within your control. You chose to come here, you chose to talk -to belittle my vocation- just as you chose to become a pickle. You are the master of your universe, and yet you are dripping with rat blood and feces. Your enormous mind literally vegetating by your own hand. I have no doubt that you would be bored senseless by therapy, the same way I'm bored when I brush my teeth and wipe my ass. Because the thing about repairing, maintaining, and cleaning is it's not an adventure. There's no way to do it so wrong you might die. It's just work. And the bottom line is, some people are okay going to work, and some people well, some people would rather die. Each of us gets to choose."

[emptyfile]

>They wouldn't call it work/life balance if work was really part of your life.

Wow, absolutely agree.

[Wed19Sep]

I think it's not a matter of the field (engineer or musician), but rather a matter of personality. I know some people who really take pride in their accomplishments at work, as if the project they worked on is really part of what they were proud to achieve in their life as a whole. I also know other types of people for whom being an employee merely means being at the service of a project that isn't theirs, which will therefore never deliver any actual satisfaction. For this latter category the true way around is to find a way to live by monetizing their own ideas and projects, either by trying to create their own company, or by trying to monetize open-source stuff, etc

[isodude]

Time is not wasted if you enjoy wasting it. The life part can be dull for some as well. If all your work time is lost time, it's time to change routines or perspective, don't be satisfied with less.