Why do I believe that a toxic work culture exists and perpetuates partly due to a mindset of work over everything and overall life imbalance?
Well there’s a big assumption in there. That’s with the assumption that work can’t provide you with everything or at least many things that ‘life’ has to offer. I think when people feel like they’re missing out on a social life because of work, then obviously you’ll want to create those circles and connections outside of it. But I feel perfectly content with having my circles being what they are now because I get to interact in friendship type of ways with coworkers. The need to balance out my work part of my life with my social part of my life is not as great. My career is a way for me to fulfill a large part of that. Of course I will have friends outside, but I don’t feel like I’m lacking anything if I just hung out with people at work.
Then there’s the passion and purpose side of it. When you do what you don’t like to do for a career, then the more energy you’ll have to expend trying to balance that out with hobbies and things you do like to do. But if you do what you like for a career, then you won’t need to do that as much, it at all. The escape velocity to escape the gravitational pull of work / career is much lower, so you can do it with much more ease. That’s why people always saw do what you love. So really, what they’re saying is ‘You’ll have to do fewer things in your time outside of work to find greater balance in your life.”
So this societal attitude is here because of that assumption that a career is something you do that you don’t necessarily like. Then you spend the rest of your time trying to compensate for that. But if you switch that assumption to ‘my career is a way for me to achieve life balance’ rather than ‘a way that takes me away from it’ then this whole balance thing wouldn’t exist. Because it insinuates that you’re in imbalance when you work and have to balance it out with ‘life’ to get that balance. That’s the opposite assumption that we should be having.
So it’s with this assumption that when you work long hours, then of course you’ll feel burnt out. But if you do what you like, then even if you work just as many or longer hours, you won’t really feel burnt out. Then that way, even if you work long hours, you feel like imbalance.
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