Some days – almost all the working days – I am troubled by the time structure of life. I want my mornings slow. Reading social media, making coffee, drinking coffee, watering plants. I want to walk to the office. There, I should work for eight hours but when it’s sunny outside I’d love to go for run over lunch and I’m tired after six to seven hours of work. And in the evening I want play D&D or practice Aikido or sit and read with my wife, and time is running out and where did it all go?
To be fair, there are also the days when I’d love to sit in the office until late, the last one staring at the screen, tapping that keyboard, an island of light in a sea of darkness. But it’s rare and it usually means plans fell through for the evening.
Is my schedule too full? Is age creeping up on me, trying to tell me I must slow down? I must slow down even more? I already work a part time job and yet there is so much left to do.
I’ll have to try and focus. Tell myself to be positive about it. My life is full. I want to work because I want the money in order to be carefree the rest of the time. It is the carefreelessness that enables me to fill it with all the things I enjoy and thus it will always be the case that I want more of it. A certain unhappiness is unavoidable and has to be dealt with.
This work-life-balance thing is hard, even if you work a part-time Job like I do.
#Philosophy #Life
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How did you convince your employer to let you work part-time, and how part is it? 🙂
– Adam 2019-03-27 22:10 UTC
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I work 60% over the year, usually Friday’s off and a four month summer break.
– Alex Schroeder 2019-03-27 22:16 UTC
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@sajith recommended the book The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, by Jonathan Haidt. I just read through How to Become Happier and I am intrigued.
– Alex Schroeder 2019-03-28 06:05 UTC
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I’ve always been skeptical about self help books. I think less time put on them, and more on real books, is a better strategy to become happier. On that line, I suggest Herman Hesse’s “Siddartha”, Tolstoi “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” or Jorge Semprun’s “L’écriture ou la vie” if you haven’t read them yet.
On the topic of work life balance, it seems to me that you have a very healthy solution going on. Perhaps you could use a creative mid term goal to spend your free time on (pottery, woodworking, painting...) away from the screens? Even if that would mean reading your posts less often...
– Enzo 2019-03-30 09:55 UTC
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I’ve read Siddartha as a teenager. Another one that was a big influence at the time was Erich Fromm’s To Have or to Be?. I haven’t read the two others. But perhaps you are right and reading good books where advice about the good life is incidental is actually the better thing to do.
– Alex Schroeder 2019-03-30 12:39 UTC