Work-Life Balance?

Is there such a thing as work-life balance?

A friend of mine once texted me that work/life harmony > work/life balance.

The phrase "Balance your work and life" works under the assumption that work and life are both mutually exclusive. I'm writing this to think about the question if it is one.

Let's try to make sense of what work-life harmony means. Harmonizing work and life should lead to a comfortable position of freedom of what to do and when to do.

Confused?

Naval Ravikant believes that having an unscheduled life is a good way of attaining freedom. You won't be bound by calendar events. While that is not possible for everyone, there's a lesson to learn from it.

In the case of work-life balance, because work and life are understood to be mutually exclusive, there's a scope for structuring and organizing your daily-life activities based on the idea of balancing work and life can lead to lesser conflicts between them. To achieve balance, you may be required to schedule the time between office hours and family whereas in work-life harmony, we are confronted with real-time choices of what is of priority to us. It isn't governed by todo lists, calendar events but rather our own ability to choose what's good for us in the short term.

When we talk about harmonizing work and life, it doesn't have require any kind of formal structuring and organization of what to do and when to do. Our daily-life decisions and the intensity of their importance govern our priorities and that leads to the harmony we're talking about.

To sum it up, harmonizing work and life makes you free of structures that may make you feel suffocated after a point of time.

As they say, adapt and learn.