People who are thinking of their personal and professional lives as in conflict with each other are thinking as man sees, not as God does.
People who are thinking of their personal and professional lives as in conflict with each other are thinking as man sees, not as God does.
A t some point ten years ago or so, a client asked if I would offer a little career advice to their son. He was 21 years old, bright, about to graduate from a good college in a big city, and certainly employable. He had a good home life, high character, and was ambitious enough to want to come talk to his parents’ investment adviser. His first question upon sitting down in my Manhattan office: “How solid is the work–life balance in the field of wealth management?”
Twenty-one years old, never had a real job in his life — “How solid is the work–life balance?” I never really bounced back in the rest of the talk.
I interviewed a candidate for an administrative position a few months after this meeting. I liked her a lot and was confident I would offer her a position, but I first needed to hear what questions she would have for me. She hadn’t yet asked about compensation, benefits, vertical mobility, opportunities for professional development, or team culture. I was confident that our position in all of those categories was very strong, but until a candidate asks and you answer, you can’t be certain that what you’re offering will match what they’re looking for. At the end of the interview, I said that I was prepared to make her an offer and asked what questions she had for me before I put one together. Her reply: “Yes, I just need to know what the work–life balance is going to be. I really don’t want my life to be about an office job.”
She was also in her twenties, a single college graduate without much experience, and seemingly couldn’t care less about the compensation or career path of the position. She just wanted to know before we went any further what time she would get to the gym every day. You can probably imagine how that ended.
I have interviewed countless young people who, upon receiving a job offer, informed me that they couldn’t start for a few months because they were first doing a three-month trip to Europe, or a two-month trip to South America, or a one-month trip to Timbuktu. When I explained that we couldn’t wait that long to fill the position, they expressed dismay that I wanted to disrupt their personal time. I am sure plenty of you can relate to the career launch that a three-month trip to Europe was before you showed up for your first day of work.
To be fair, this type of incident is par for the course these days. These young people are victims of cultural programming, not the cause of it. This mentality has become systemic, something unrecognizable to my own Generation X and the Baby Boomer generation before us. As for the generations before them . . . well, let’s just say that I shudder to think how things would go if a twentysomething asked my grandparents what their “work–life” balance was like in their twenties. You wouldn’t want to see it either.
I am in no way criticizing the idea of someone doing anything outside of the office when they are in the early stage of their career. I am not criticizing someone having a social life, or time for exercise, or aspirations unrelated to their early-career job. I fully support dating, marriage, friends, travel, church, and whatever else accompanies building out a career. I worked a lot in my pre-marriage twenties — a lot — but I did have friends, I did take vacations, and I certainly went to church. The issue is not making an idol out of work, which I would oppose as much as I would making an idol out of anything (including one’s friends, family, exercise routine, girlfriend, boyfriend, or kids).
Rather, the issue is the bizarre mentality that what we are after (and even owed) is some perfectly compartmentalized existence where the ideal allocation of our time is served up on a silver platter. This aim is foreign in the history of human experience, as is the audacity to even ask the question.
Your Life Is Not Closet Space
Our lives, priorities, passions, and responsibilities are not socks that all need to be rolled up and stuffed in one drawer of finite space. Neither are they different types of clothing that force decisions the way we must decide how many pairs of pants we want to keep in the closet versus shirts or coats or sweaters. The entire paradigm is wrong — from the vocabulary to the intent to the execution.
An unerring formula for how our time will be allocated to different responsibilities on any given day is as likely as any other crystal ball of life’s mysteries and adventures. Parenting is full of unknowns. Marriage is as well. Oh, and so is your job. Placing artificial constraints on one of these variable aspects of our life because of a demand for “balance” is impractical, immature, entitled, and futile.
Different seasons of life present different realities. Some decades present different seasons from others, and each year differs from other years. We see this play out on a minute level every day — some days call for people to leave the office early for a kid’s basketball game, and on other days we have to stay late at the office for a work project. That is the flexible and spontaneous nature of adult life, and post-adolescent impositions of a “work–life balance” clash with reality.
Disciplined people set habits, routines, and best practices, and then they allow for flexibility. That flexibility is an exercise in humility — the kind that recognizes that we are not God, and that “things happen.” Work is not one outfit in our closet that we like, and neither are the relationships we hold dear. You can only wear one outfit from your closet at once, but ontologically we are always a husband or wife, always a parent or child, and always a worker not to be ashamed. These components of our life, ordained by God from creation as they are, do not get turned on or off like a light switch. It is crazy that we would try to do so.
I am more than willing to admit my occasional failures as a husband or father. I have most certainly erred at times in these roles, and I consider my wife and children saints for putting up with me (for a lot of reasons). But I do not believe one of those reasons is that I “work too hard.” If someone were underperforming at work, their supervisor would not say to them, “You are just being too good a parent.” We are only conditioned to believe that an overfocus in one area of life causes neglect in other areas with one thing: work!
“Work–life balance” is a poorly phrased euphemism for asking someone to work less, think about work less, or care about work less. No one has ever used that term in my earshot to describe someone who is too focused on kids, church, charity, or marriage. In recent decades, as people’s time on the internet has often obviously harmed their performance at work, and often even their duties as a parent or spouse, even then we do not refer to this as a “work–life balance” issue.
Someone who regularly comes home from work and ignores their children, pulls out a non-urgent work project, and routinely works during a family dinner or activity is not struggling from a lack of “balance.” They are being a rude, inconsiderate jerk. They are depriving their family of their time, love, and attention. Balance is not the problem; a failure to live up to basic human responsibilities is.
Dualism by Any Other Name
When we refer to a work–life balance, we are linguistically pitting two things against each other. We are presupposing that one is not a part of the other, and, in fact, that the two are to some degree at odds. Throughout my new book, Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life, I have tried to dismantle the dualism that pits the sacred against the secular. I would suggest that an equally malignant form of dualism is this very notion of “work versus life.” Our work is not set against our life, and our life is not in competition with our work. This binary is conceptually wrong because it is theologically errant.
In Christian circles, one hears a lot about a pyramid of priorities — God, family, and then our jobs. This structure is useful for exactly one purpose: to undermine vocational calling. Acting as though the elements of our life that God has called us to, that are important to Him, and that are instrumental in manifesting His Kingdom, are à la carte menu items that warrant some form of “1–10” ranking, is abhorrent. We have one primary loyalty because there is one God, and He will share His glory with nobody and nothing. Nothing is an acceptable counterfeit God — not our careers, our families, or our hobbies.
Once we accept that God is the sole target of our worship, obedience, and endeavor, the question is how we are to worship, obey, and honor Him. If you believe the answer is to faithfully do that which He has called you to — being a good spouse, a good parent, and a good worker — then there is never room to put these things in competition with Him. If we are first and foremost to love God, and loving God means obeying Him in the context of His redemptive work, then our marriages and careers are both part of that endeavor. They do not linger outside of our relationship with Him; they are an integral part of that relationship.
Someone does not say that they do not care about their diet because they want to stay laser-focused on their health. Their diet, nutrition, and exercise are all crucial contributors to their health. The modern attempt to pit things that God cares about against Him is a substitute for accepting His expectations for us. I do not desire a robust vision for family, work, and community as a replacement for Christian living; rather, these dimensions and paradigms are the embodied context in which we serve God, now.
Dualistic efforts to separate these things from one another are untenable and normatively wrong.
This is an excerpt from David L. Bahnsen’s Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life, out February 6, 2024.