Have you ever noticed you have solved all the world’s problems while driving in the car? Probably not a good idea to be that distracted while driving in Dallas nowadays. Apparently we recently won the worst city to drive in gold medal.
Anyway, some attempts at remembering what I thought about while driving yesterday.
And the reason I say ridiculous work life balance phrase is because in the general social media world, it tends to focus on middle class people trying to balance work and their home life when actually it is much more.
For example and this is a minority of people, but there are people who are very successful at one type of career and they are blissfully unaware of the world this way. And they cannot understand why people cannot stick to something and try to reach the highest pinnacle in that field or be satisfied with a modicum of success. And on the surface there isn’t anything inherently wrong with this thought, it just limits who you are as a person. This leads me to my point. When people limit themselves to one endeavor they not only limit themselves, but they are limiting society. And I would also suggest they are limiting their own happiness.
Have you ever noticed there are some people that are all over the map with what they do? They can never focus on one task or career or endeavor and in many cases, they never really reach what people who subscribe to the American work ethic as successful.
These two examples are outliers to the big problem. The majority of us in shape form or fashion, engage in a multitude of ventures throughout our lives and then attempt to balance. This balance has become what I mentioned above in the modern social media world. And this isn’t what my thoughts yesterday were trying to work out, but it frustrates me because it interferes with tackling the much larger issue.
And that is people need a much broader sense of who they are and what they do because it leads to a better society. Sure it helps if people volunteer at their local food pantry or church or other non profit along with working, but it is even more.
Think about the ultra successful that seem to work at their career till their death. Is it because they are a “type A” personality? They do not know better or have been shown better? They are fearful on attempting something new? Is it some combination of all these factors? Who knows, but they create a void in their lives that carries forward if society picks this up as a norm. And they may or potentially scoff at this thinking.
The issue I somehow came to yesterday was this singular way of thinking permeates large portions of our society and it becomes a norm to focus on one undertaking and let someone else who has focused on a singular undertaking in another area be your resource and you have a misguided trust they dedicated the time to understand their world as much as you understand your singular world.
We accept that others are as responsible as ourselves. We want to focus on what makes us successful so as not to have to think about other problems or concerns or issues. This give us the impression our insulated world is actually good. And throw in the fact most people are conformists by nature and it compounds the problem. Good hard working well intention people can be lead astray. And it allows people with singular purpose dictate to others or control others via an over reliance on the above discussion.
For example, lobbying in our country and the products of the Citizens United decision allow singular purpose to control how our legislation is written. If you rely on others for information, news or social content you are more susceptible to misinformation and social control.
And being Republican or Democrat have nothing to do with the above, it is we allowing this way of thinking to help us manage the world, allow singular purpose people or organizations to manage us.
So how does this apply to that work life balance ridiculous phrase. It is because we, both as ourselves and then carry forward to society, do not see that there is a larger balance in life we need to achieve. And to make change it starts with the simple and obvious answers such as a successful businessman may need to change focus and start using their knowledge to manage a non- profit and simultaneously learn from the non profit while also broadening the intake of information and worldviews of themselves and the people they now manage or a professor taking their knowledge and applying it in real world situations in maybe a completely different field, again bringing their worldview and clashing it with other people’s worldviews and expanding both worlds.
These are just two simple specific examples that draw together ideas to broaden people’s perspectives. You can work in a vast amount of scenarios to start to create this goal, yet it is this beginning hopefully that helps all of us understand the misnomer of the phrase work life balance. We need to broaden our attempts in creating new unbalances to make our work life balance more productive for ourselves and society. And yes the infamous, get out of our comfort zones phrase applies, but we need to address this with attacking this to look beyond our own goals,to not just give ourselves more success ie get out of our comfort zones to find a new comfort zone for many.
And then we can see why Citizen’s United is a failure for this country, why social media is a failure for our country, not because the mechanism is a failure, but because we cannot see how it is failing us in its current application.We need to learn how the tools are being used because it is always how we use tools that define what is made.
Cheers
And all this made a heck of a bunch more sense while dodging cars at 70 mph crossing three lanes to exit. Gotta love entitled drivers. Maybe that had partially something to do with the above. Or what I was thinking at the time that created the hodge podge of thought above.
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