Some more thoughts on goals in life and work-life balance
2023-08-31
After I wrote the article " My take on goals in life and work-life balance " a few weeks ago, several additional thoughts came to my mind either through some of the people I follow online or just everyday experiences. So, let's tackle them in this supplementing post (with the potential of more to come)...
A really big realisation that was wondering around my brain for quite some time now, but never managed to become phrasably clear until recently is the idea of work-life balance being about energy, not only time . Niklas Steenfatt pointed this out in his amazing weekly newsletter and that was the moment my mental barrier fell like scales from my eyes. Everyone should have experienced the strange effect of loosing all senses of time during your favourite hobbies with time just flying by, while struggling to finish a day full of boring activities with the time stretching like bubble gum. This exact concept can the scaled up to your whole work life and still applies beautifully. 40 hours of this isn't equal to 40 hours of that. The same employee that's near a burnout in one job, may find balance and fulfillment in another job with the same number of hours. Personally, I was never really effected by this, since I knew from a very early age that I want to become a software developer and am in the fortunate position to make that a reality, but there are measures to make your work more enjoyable (almost) everyone can use. One very effective method is to sit down at the end of every day and decide for all tasks, appointments and events in general whether they gave you energy or stole it from you. With this clear picture, you then can do everything in your power to ban or at least reduce the influence of the energy stealing activities from your life.
Banning things your don't need is also a perfect transition to my second thought, which is about the value of minimalism as well as travelling and heavily inspired by Ricky Kresslein . As we humans go through life, we tend to acquire more and more stuff and responsibilities, which force us to stay on our current route indefinitely (or at least until it's too late to change something). Keeping that to a minimum can really open your life up to so many more possibilities like doing a half-year camping trip, exploring the countries you always wanted to visit or just start over in a new, exciting place - all while not missing out on things you are used to (since you already had a minimal lifestyle before) and possibly earning your regular wage through working remotely. Don't get me wrong, wanting to marry, build a house and ultimately start your own family is certainly an honourable goal in life and might even be something for me in the far future, but don't lock yourself into this course too early and keep your freedoms while being (or feeling) young. Life is too short to do boring stuff or even things you hate!
Even though, this idea was already indirectly mentioned in the last paragraph, I want to close this post with an explicit emphasis of the importance and advantages of having an extremely open mindset - ideally assuming most people to be fundamentally good. You won't just meet new people and maybe start life-long friendships, but also learn things you couldn't even think about before and get to know drastically different lifestyles. In a nutshell, you will expand your horizon to unprecedented expanses - and that's not just a possibility, but almost guaranteed due to curious nature of us humans. With that said, feel free to share any expierences with the points I mentioned in the comments down below and have an amazing week...