Sabien on "work-life" balance

Definitely not true for everyone, but it's especially true for highly demand folks like programmers who have the luxury of choosing work that's aligned with their interests.

This sounds overly optimistic to me (am a programmer). I wonder what fraction of programmers would stay at their jobs if they had "fuck-you money".

Maybe this is a consequence of me not living in Silicon Valley, but the job market for programmers seems... weird. On one hand, every company is complaining about how difficult it is to hire programmers. On the other hand, most companies keep doing things that many programmers hate: "agile" micromanagement, open spaces, no working from home (pre-COVID), etc. I would naively assume that given the amount of complaining, the companies would compete harder at being attractive places to work at. Somehow, they do not. Most programmers I know are complaining about their jobs. This may be a coincidence, or a selection effect on my side; but that's how I see it.

That context is still relevant to a lot of people, but for many it makes a lot less sense, and work-life balance more seems to be refer to not letting work consume your life when you can be contacted anytime anywhere day or night.

Right -- though you could say the underlying core sentiment is still somewhat similar in that regard.

 "Old work-life balance" -- work and life are separate spheres, don't let the work sphere (a time block of say 9-5) expand to take up space at the expense of the other sphere, a separate time block. 

"New work-life balance" -- let's try to not let the work sphere intrude too much into the other sphere as a single time block (e.g., turn off the screen after 5 pm and that's it) but if that doesn't work pragmatically (e.g. on-call, work from home), still minimize the time/effort that work saps from you (that 10 min interruption to check an email followed by 5 min of worrying and planning for the next day could be shortened to 3 min total, or something, then forgotten about before returning to dinner).

In one case, I imagine work as one single bloc of contiguously colored territory and non-work as another, and you want to avoid the one territory expanding too much at the expense of the second.   In the other one territory has made small patches of enclaves into the other, but the balance is the same -- you want to make sense total area of one color is not too big or small, whether it's contiguous or not. (The area or size of patches could be time, mental effort or whatever in the metaphor).

>And as Duncan is getting at, employment has changed a lot since the term was coined and there's now a lot more opportunity for jobs and work to be aligned with a person's personal goals.

I can agree, I am skeptical that this ...integratedness(?) is actually a good thing for everyone. From point of view of the old "work vs life" people who valued the life part, it probably looks like them losing if what they get is "your work is supposed to integral part of what you choose to do with your life" but the options of where and what kind of work to do are not that different than they were some decades ago. And even the new^1 options present trade-offs.

Maybe there are some people whose true calling is to found a startup or develop mastery in some particular technology stack or manage projects that create profit for stockholders. However, if the job market environment is shaped by it so that every job expects an applicant whose life goals are integrally aligned to performing the job, it plausibly affects what kind of goals people think are thinkable when they think of their life and careers, because it certainly affects how they present themselves to the hiring committee or people with equivalent power.

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Another point, concerning integration of work in ones life. I found myself thinking of the movie Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari, 1953), which I saw maybe two years ago. While the story is not exactly about jobs, it explores how the modernity (the contemporary, post-WW2, kind  of modernity in particular) intersects with the Japanese society through the lenses of single Japanese family. The many characters in the film work various jobs: there is a son who is a physician (the kind of one who does visits and has a private practice), a daughter who is running a beauty saloon (a family business like setup; if the husband did something not affiliated with business, I forget what), and a daughter-in-law who is a menial clerk at a corporate business.

The part where this musing connects to anything, while writing the first part of the comment, I started to think about, what are the personal goals of the physician and the beauty business owner? If I recall, both of them are the kind of person who wants to strive and get forward and upward in their life in Tokyo (this leads to the one of conflicts in the film) and view their jobs integral to that goal. Their jobs are quite integrated to their life in concrete terms, both practice at their homes. Both kind of professions predate the work-life balance, probably. One could replace the beauty saloon with something a bit more traditional, like a restaurant or inn without much difference to their relevance to story, at the very least. The character with clearest difference between time off and time in work is the office clerk. Which actually connects to another plot point. I recommend the movie.

Maybe the big difference comes implied in the "good for the world in ways I care about" angle There is no crusader or activist, someone who seeks to make change in the world instead of making it well within it. Today the doctor would be likely to emphasize how he wants to help  people by being a good doctor, the family business would have a thing (natural beauty products that help the environment, powered by solar!), and the big corp would have mission, too. The owner of the corp, several echelons above, might be even serious about it. Nobody goes to found a start-up.

So, I guess my point is that there always have been people who don't view their work and non-work lives a fundamentally different kind of thing.

1: The newness might be debatable, though. I don't think starting a technology business because you have skills and ideas is something truly new in the US, I think both Edison and Tesla tried their hands at it and I have read Tesla's interviews which indicate he thought it was for the betterment of mankind? It would have been with the spirit of the times.

Duncan posted it in a private chat I was in (and on FB); I asked if he'd cross-post to LW, or if he'd prefer that I post it for him; he voted for the latter. He didn't ask for it to be cross-posted, but also didn't object.