How do you balance work and home life?

There is no shortage of advice on the internet and social media regarding achieving a balance between work and home life. Spending 80 hours of your week at work means you have less time for family and home life. Each person needs to set their boundaries – we must work to live, not live to work.

In an economy that prioritises profitability over human needs, it is not surprising that corporations enforce a business model requiring workers to work over 40 hours a week. There is conscionable overtime – deadline pressure, delivering results for clients, serving customers, all compel us to put in the extra hours. When 80, 90, 100 hour working weeks become the norm so the hedge fund owners of a company can make extra profits, then finding a work-life balance is hard to achieve.

When economic news comes on during the news programmes on corporate media, they immediately cover the gyrations of the stock market. Now, if you enjoy gambling on the stock market, please go for it. If you achieve wealth through the buying and selling of shares, then I say more power to you.

However, we are missing a crucial point – the stock market is not the economy. The stock market is only one tiny component of a nation’s economy. Working people, factories, industries, reducing unemployment, the affordability (or lack thereof) of basic goods and services – these make up the economy.

When economics news is on the television, it reports exclusively on the stock market. That kind of reporting only provides a false impression, one that excludes the vast majority of people from the economy.

As I wrote in 2020, let’s stop using the stock market’s volatility and never-ending gyrations as a measure of economic health. We should report on the reduction of unemployment, for instance, as an important measure of economic health.

When a person lands a job, they enter the economy as a worker, and have to make decisions about finding a work-home life balance.

A public health crisis, such as the spread of a disease or virus, renders masses of people unable to work. That has economic consequences which we cannot afford to ignore.

In Australia, I can rely on the tap water to be fit for human consumption. We have proper water filtration and testing systems in place. If we stop testing for cholera for instance, a water-borne infection, the water becomes unreliable. Indeed, it becomes a disease-bearing vector. What happens to the economy in these circumstances?

Having worked in the IT industry for the last thirty or thirty five years, I can say it is difficult to find a work-home life balance, but not impossible. As more software development companies are bought up by private equity firms, the pressure to work overly long hours – 80, 90 hours a week – increases on the workforce.

Freelancing is okay, but you have to find steady clients to guarantee a constant income stream. Putting yourself out there week after week, having to prove your competency and skill set exerts an emotional burden on your psyche.

We cannot avoid discussing the impact of AI when talking about work, especially work in the IT industry. We are now witnessing the fulfilment (well, at least partially) of the Moravec paradox.

What the hell is that?

Hans Moravec (1948 – ) an Austrian-born Canadian computer scientist, noted a paradox in 1988 regarding artificial intelligence (AI). Computers could solve mathematical equations, perform statistical analysis and play chess, but they could not wash dishes, build pipelines, fix electrical wires or dig holes in the ground for houses. So that meant that what humans found difficult, was easy for AI. What humans found easy, was difficult or virtually impossible for AI.

What does that mean for work? It means lawyers will be replaced by AI, but not electricians or plumbers. Tradespeople are not directly threatened by AI, but workers performing intellectual labour (lawyers, accountants, software developers) can be made redundant by AI.

There is an element of truth to this. However, we need to consider the following; as AI insinuates itself into every facet of our lives, the tradesperson becomes ever more reliant on AI. The car will not be driven by a robot, the car is becoming a robot. The washing machine, by incorporating AI into its operational cycle, is becoming a robot. The manual worker is being increasingly replaced by robotics.

AI is increasingly being used in medical procedures, flight control and banking/financial transactions and management. What happens to work when we outsource our thinking to machines?

Achieving a work-home life balance requires us to consider not just ourselves, but what kind of economic system in which we are living and working.