Nobody actually wants "work-life balance."
The only reason they think they want it is because they hate their work (even if they've convinced themselves they don't). Their parents grew up in industrial times where job opportunities were limited, so they sold you their version of "what you should do with your life," and you went to a public school funded by a government that serves its own interests, fueled by the incentive of getting you ready for college to become a useful worker.
Most people want their work to fit their lifestyle, not their lifestyle to fit their work, but they don't realize that nobody is going to give that to you. You must create it yourself.
Whenever I call my mom, she'll ask what I did that week, and I give her the same answer:
"The usual. Walked a lot. Worked a lot. Went to the gym a lot."
And as always, she says that I should take a break and have some fun. My mom is just looking out for me, of course.
But that's the thing... if anything were more fun than what I was already doing, I would do it.
Why would you keep doing something you hated when, if you think clearly, there is always a series of steps you can take to never do that again, no matter how bad your current situation is?
That said...
Balance is for the mediocre.
I don't say that to get a reaction out of you. I say it because it's true. And I'll prove it, if you're willing to listen.
By the end of this letter, you'll understand:
Why your brain rewards you for being extreme, making life more enjoyable
How to avoid getting stuck in the mediocre middle that leads to a life of constant low-level stress
How modern life is filled with comfort drugs that you become literally addicted to
How to simulate artificial adversity to take back control of your life
If you take this to heart, you'll look back 6 months from now and hate the thought of living a "balanced" life.
The intensity paradox – why contrast beats balance
Being extreme rewires your brain. Novelty and challenge stimulate neuroplasticity. Your mind filters reality based on what you're obsessed with. Intensity creates focus, focus creates progress, progress creates enjoyment.
The need for balance, by today's definition, usually stems from not enjoying what you do.
You feel the need to escape your work because you have a horrible relationship with it. You don't want to work, so you can't wait to go home and rest, hang out with friends, or go on your next vacation where you can finally "live."
This mindset contains a fundamental misunderstanding of what work is.
Work – when it is aligned with your goals, values, and greater purpose in life that we are often unaware of or constantly distracted from due to a lack of personal development – is a vessel for sharing the best parts of yourself (the value you've cultivated) with the world.
In order to do great work, you need ideas, sleep, health, growth, experience, confidants and relationships. You must have your life together. If you don't enjoy your work, none of these things matter, because you don't care about the result of your work. You're simply there to get paid and survive. You don't have a goal that demands you at your best. All you have to do is show up to your desk with a hungover and half-functioning brain just to get through the day so you can plop yourself in front of a screen to hopefully forget about doing the same thing tomorrow.
Most people would be much better off if they exchanged balance for contrast.
Contrast is oscillating periods of intensity.
Deep work followed by deep rest.
Disciplined nutrition followed by an extravagant dinner.
Intense training followed by complete recovery.
Periods of solitude followed by social connection.
Among other examples.
Each period enhances and gives meaning to its opposite.
You begin to appreciate the smaller things in life, which turns a bland everyday experience into a life of interest and zest. Everything is extremely interesting if you look deep enough.
Incredible food tastes better when you don't have it every day. Rest becomes deeper when you feel accomplished in your work and aren't thinking about the stressful tasks you have waiting for you tomorrow. Socializing becomes less of a drag when you actually have experiences worth sharing.
Contrast is a pattern of nature:
Creation and destruction.
High and low tide.
Sleeping and waking.
Happiness and sadness.
It's like the universe is showing what leads to a good life, but you're too stuck in your head to see it.
Yin-yang is not about static balance but dynamic rhythm. Each force contains the seed of its opposite. Happiness, as an example, would be inconceivable without a reference point of sadness. It wouldn't exist. At the same time, sadness (or any other "negative" emotion) doesn't have to destroy you if you understand that happiness will never be a permanent state. One leads to another.
Being stuck in the middle is being out of alignment with nature, and its consequences are brutal:
The mediocre middle – how to ruin your life fast
The ultimate goal is to have a life so beautifully designed that work, rest, and play cease to exist. They all blur together and are indistinguishable.
The Buddhist "Middle Way" is not about moderation.
It's a dance between extremes. Embracing the full range of the human experience, not trying to avoid any part of it because you don't like how it feels.
If you can't embrace darkness, you have very little capacity for light.
"Balance" creates a constant low-level stress, an ambient anxiety, because you never fully commit to one side.
You're always half-working or half-resting.
When you wake up in the morning, you project into the predictable future of stressful tasks. You don't see today being any different from what it was yesterday, so the stress you've always experienced is the stress you will always continue to experience. You're living a different day, sure, but the way you feel doesn't change at all, so every day blends together.
That's the nature of the mediocre middle.
You wake up 40 years later – too late to do anything about it – wondering why you didn't take a risk and bet on yourself.
But why does this happen?
Why do people never realize this trap and make the choice to move in the other direction?
Well, there are quite a few reasons.
First, conditioning. Social conditioning is the root problem that must always be taken into account when you find yourself in a life situation that is disadvantageous to reaching your potential.
I'll write a more in-depth letter on how society is a pyramid scheme that serves itself, but for now, understand that your mind is a pattern recognition and goal-striving machine.
We have the psychology of hunter-gatherers. We are wired to survive. But in today's world, that takes a completely different shape. We survive through both genetics and memetics. Body and mind.
The pre-internet generations in the West only knew "one true path" in life. Get an education, get a job, get a car, spouse, and house, then retire.
That's fine, but your parents and teachers nail those goals into your head, and that shapes the opportunities you perceive and act on. Since those goals shape who we are, and we want to survive, we also resist change. It's a painful journey to break off the default path.
The outsized opportunities today exist on the internet, and they demand a completely different way of life. In fact, it requires us to go back to a time before industrialization when most careers were self-directed. Most education was apprenticeship, and most people were artisans or farmers. They were entrepreneurs by today's standards.
People pursue formal education because it's what they were supposed to do. It holds a lot of status, but it serves the goals of society.
An interest-based self-education is not flashy. It's not certain. Attendance isn't required and nobody is going to tell you what goal you should pursue instead of the job, but it is the only way to take back control of your life.
That's the first problem.
The next is far worse.
Modern life is filled with drugs – deprivation creates abundance
Since the average individual is always in a state of ambient anxiety due to living in the predictable future or familiar past, they become addicts.
The modern world is filled to the brim with comforts, conveniences, and pleasures that were meant to make our lives better. Technology makes what used to be impossible possible, but has dire consequences if you don't study, create, and uphold the pillars of a good life.
For most people, the pleasures of technology have become drugs.
They think about tomorrow's stressful tasks
That stress narrows their ability to think
Lower consciousness thinking makes it difficult to act in a way that would change their life
They reach for the closest solution: entertainment, food, and anything else that gives them that sweet cheap dopamine hit so they don't have to experience the pain of growth
This isn't a big deal at first, but as with any drug, the higher your tolerance, the more you need to use.
The average person has filled their day with these drugs and have nothing greater to pursue, so they don't see a problem with it, and they don't realize that they are decreasing their capacity for happiness and enjoyment.
Extreme euphoria is their baseline state.
Hyperstimulation is normal to them.
The more of these drugs they use, the more numb they become to pleasurable experiences.
Improving your health, wealth, and relationships is no longer desirable because the dopamine you receive from those are nowhere near as strong as what you are used to.
If you want to change your life, you must treat comfort like a controlled substance.
Here's how:
Artificial adversity – you need to simulate a hunter-gatherer environment
You and I are not like cows. We're not meant to graze all day. We're meant to hunt like lions. We're closer to carnivores in our omnivorous development than we are to herbivores. As an intellectual athlete, you want to function like an athlete. Which means you train hard, then you sprint, then you rest, then you reassess. This idea that you're going to have linear output just by cranking every day at the same amount of time sitting… That's machines. Machines are meant to work 9-5, not humans. — Naval Ravikant
Our brains are wired to hunt, but we no longer live in a hunter-gatherer environment.
What does that mean?
You have to simulate adversity because it rarely occurs naturally in modern life.
In other words, you manufacture scarcity. You deprive yourself of pleasure so that your dopamine signalling works like a normal functioning human.
You eat bland yet nutritious food so that when you go out, you actually taste the food.
You train so hard that you appreciate normal waking life.
You work in short bursts of intensity so that rest and leisure are actually spent on rest and leisure.
You leverage technology and knowledge not as a way to numb yourself from the negatives of life, but as a way to maintain your sensitivity to everyday life.
Cold exposure or heat exposure
Intermittent fasting
Sleep deprivation cycles
Voluntary poverty while building a business
Downgrading your lifestyle
Social isolation periods (monk mode)
Gratitude deprivation (if you practice gratitude often and it becomes normal)
Digital detox or social media detox
Unless you plan to break off from this beautiful world with all of its luxuries and live in the woods, cut off from civilization and closed off to new opportunities that create abundance, incorporating some form of artificial adversity in your life is a tool to ensure that your mind doesn't get destroyed by modernity.
Thank you for reading.
– Dan
But how can we do this if we have to work at our 9-5 jobs or go to school with additional schoolwork/study to do at home?
There already goes 8-10 hours of our day to work that doesn’t satisfy us, but there’s not really a feasible option to quit it in the near future. Just spending 8 hours at school everyday drains me physically, mentally and intellectually and leaves no energy to spend on working on the things I love. Plus, I have to spend 1-2 hours at home just for homework, not even for studying when I have exams coming up. + I have other responsibilities I have to take care of. It drives me crazy not working on the things I really love creating. School drains me so much and goes against my intuition and goals. I only have ~8 months left until I graduate, but it’s driving me crazy.
Hard disagree on this one.
The assumption that those who seek work-balance being done out of hate for their jobs is an uninformed generalized claim. It is important for anyone, even those who love their job, to still leave room for family, relationships, leisure, and rest which are all part of a work-life balance.
I will argue that the opposite is true. Those who love their job need balance the most.
If you have built a job for yourself that aligns with your values and passions – protect it. Extremes are not sustainable. There will be a breaking point if you focus all of your energy on work. No matter how much you love it, work is still work. It is taxing on your mind and body. Burnout will creep onto anybody, no exceptions, if you don't create balance. Once you burnout, your work will crumble in a downwards spiral. Your work relies on your wellbeing.
Balance does not equal mediocrity. A balanced life is a fruitful life. It is a privilege to have room for curiosities outside of work.
If you make the argument that those who seek work-life balance do so because they hate their work, then you must also argue that those who avoid work-life balance do so because they hate their life outside of work.
All of this to say, it is hypocritical that this article is coming from a man claiming to only work 4 hours a day, which doesn't seem like the schedule of someone who doesn't want work-life balance.