Life balance as an elusive ideal

An approach toward fulfillment

This post looks at the elusive ideal of life balance, which is a worthy goal even if hard to achieve in practice.

I wanted this week’s post to be about how the economic and immigration issues within America have become metastatic, past the point of no return ($2 trillion deficit, $35 trillion national debt, 20 million illegals let in the past four years alone) and therefore little good will happen regardless of who wins the upcoming U.S. elections, or alternatively a post on Jacques Ellul’s conception of technique. However, something held me back from these and my intuition is taking me in a different direction this week. Instead, this is a possibly cliche post about life balance.

Growing up, a close relative equated the different aspects of life (family, work, children, spirituality, friends, exercise, etc.) to slices of a pie making up a whole. The idea was to try to achieve balance between these aspects. This wasn’t a unique insight to him, of course, and the idea exists in a lot of places on the internet. A balanced life looks something like this:

Or this:

The idea is that each of us needs to integrate these aspects into our lives in order to feel whole. It is not “happiness” that we ultimately want - happiness is an ephemeral feeling, it comes and goes, we aren’t in charge of it - but rather a sense of fulfillment. Fulfillment comes from balancing work, play, friends, family, exercise, spirituality, etc. and if we fail in doing so then it decreases the amount of fulfillment we feel, because we acutely feel the lack of those aspects that are not in alignment. This balancing is a never-ending process; there is no final goal of attainment to achieve. For example, in my close relative’s case he achieved everything he wanted in life - he got married, was in fantastic shape, moved to a remote area of the country, bought a humble but nice house with a bunch of acres, but then his life fell out of whack when he became addicted to painkillers (thanks Sacklers), ultimately leading to a shattering of the life he had created. There’s no guarantee in life of balance; it is a goal to always work toward. For me, my friendship category has taken a big hit in the past number of years - multiple friends died and I lost many more due to ideological differences which became apparent during fraudvirus. I feel the lack of friendships as a missing hole; it affects my fulfillment and was the reason for writing this post on friendship. (The lack of friendship is reflected astrologically on my progressed chart this past year and continues into next year.)

Having balance in life is pretty similar to the famous opening line of Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” It is also closely related to Aristotle’s idea of the golden mean and other Greek thought. In much the same way, fulfilled lives are similar in that they attain some degree of integration of each aspect of life; each unfulfilled person is unfulfilled in his own way. If you’re struggling with work and can’t pay bills your life is out of alignment; if your relationship with your children is bad your life is out of balance; lack of friends, or poor health, or poor exercise, or lack of spirituality, or no romantic partner, or not having hobbies, etc. Each person’s needs within each category is different; someone people need less friendship than others, they’re more introverted or whatever. But some aspect of each category must be involved in a person’s life to feel fulfilled. One of the sad aspects of this neoliberal feudal society we currently live in with an extinct middle class and only polarities of the ultra-rich and ultra-poor is that it makes it much harder to for people to achieve balance: how can one support a family, or build for retirement, or buy a home if one is unable to have a job that can support such things? I delved into this problem here and here. And how can one find a mate due to the terrible nature of modern dating and marriage in the West?

Let’s give some famous examples. John Paul Getty, one of the richest men in the world, had a terrible life balance: he was focused only on making money (and not spending it), his marriages failed and his relationship with his children was terrible, and his eldest son killed himself due to parental neglect. According to Wikipedia, “In 2013, at age 99, Getty's fifth wife, Louise, known as Teddy Getty Gaston, published a memoir recounting how Getty had scolded her for spending money too freely in the 1950s on the treatment of their six-year-old son, Timmy, who had become blind from a brain tumor. Timmy died at age 12, and Getty, living in England apart from his family, who were in the U.S., did not attend the funeral.” He only very reluctantly paid the ransom to save the life of his grandson, and he made sure it would be a tax write-off. This story was recently made into the movie All the Money in the World (2017)¹:

He was quoted as saying, “I hate to be a failure. I hate and regret the failure of my marriages. I would gladly give all my millions for just one lasting marital success." Indeed, how fulfilled can one really be if one has horrible family relations?

Another example is that of Carl Jung, who did achieve balance. He is an unusual case given he married the daughter of a wealthy industrialist where, in those days, the husband was in charge of the wife’s finances and this gave him the breathing room he needed to focus on his life’s work, even though he also had a robust and lucrative clinical practice. They had five children together. Jung stated in his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961) that focusing on real life was critical for him to remain grounded, comparing himself to what happened to Nietzsche:

Particularly at this time [during his confrontation with his unconscious], when I was working on the fantasies, I needed a point of support in “this world,” and I may say that my family and my professional work were that to me. It was most essential for me to have a normal life in the real world as a counterpoise to that strange inner world. My family and my profession remained the base to which I could always return, assuring me that I was an actually existing, ordinary person. The unconscious contents could have driven me out of my wits. But my family, and the knowledge: I have a medical diploma from a Swiss university, I must help my patients, I have a wife and five children, I live at 228 Seestrasse in Kusnacht - these were actualities which made demands upon me and proved to me again and again that I really existed, that I was not a blank page whirling about in the winds of the spirit, like Nietzsche. Nietzsche had lost the ground under his feet because he possessed nothing more than the inner world of his thoughts - which incidentally possessed him more than he it. He was uprooted and hovered above the earth, and therefore he succumbed to exaggeration and irreality. For me, such irreality was the quintessence of horror, for I aimed, after all, at this world and this life. No matter how deeply absorbed or how blown about I was, I always knew that everything I was experiencing was ultimately directed at this real life of mine. I meant to meet its obligations and fulfill its meanings. My watchword was: Hic Rhodus, hic salta!

Jung’s family and work responsibilities served as his grounding mechanism as he explored his unconscious and the world of dreams. He mentioned elsewhere in his autobiography the dangers of blindly listening to one’s unconscious, to one’s anima or to one’s impulses; it can lead to total ruination if it is not balanced against one’s thoughts, feelings, and senses. This almost happened to me more than a decade ago when I almost blindly followed my intuition; if I had it would have led to ruin. Luckily I was able to pull back in time.

Famous examples of others with imbalances in certain areas of their lives include Donald Trump (little or no spirituality), Kamala Harris (no children, little or no spirituality), Chris Christie (no exercise, bad diet), Barack Obama (obsessed with himself ala Narcissus), the Clintons’ twisted marriage, Biden’s weirdness with his daughter Ashley and his drug-addicted son Hunter, etc.

Other aspects of the pie of life worth touching on are as follows:

1. The pie shifts over time depending on one’s stage of life. Work may not be as much of the pie in younger life or in retirement; hobbies may take greater weight in retirement. Family and romance come at certain moment’s of one’s life. Work responsibilities grow with time and the amount of money one needs to live, to support a family, also changes over time. Being able to nimbly pivot to account for the changing requirements of one’s life pie, maintaining flexibility and willingness to grow, is an integral part of life. I’ve seen so many people, inflexible and holding on to their prior beliefs, unable to navigate properly the curveballs that life throws or the changing requirements associated with different phases of life. And maybe that’ll happen to me one day, who knows.

2. Balance in our life is an ideal, it is hard to achieve in actuality; there is usually one part or another that is out of whack. Personal or life circumstances may prevent one from reaching or keeping this ideal. And maybe one reaches it but then things fall apart, as it did to my close relative. It’s not a moral judgment; sometimes things are out of our hands.

3. The exact makeup of the life pie will be different for everyone, depending on our personalities, upbringing, and our life purpose. Some will lean more into work, others will lean more into family, others will lean more into friendships.

4. One cannot feel fulfilled really unless one is giving their maximum effort in whatever they do. Giving one’s full attempt helps anchor one in the moment instead of in the future or the past, it (at least for me) lowers my anxiety - I can only do what I can do, anything beyond that is outside of my control, and it helps me not to have regrets down the road. It also seems to slow down time in a way. Time speeds up as one ages and as technology advances, and it’s important to do what we can to slow down it’s passage.

5. Generally the busier one is, the easier it becomes to deal with more things in one’s life. This is paradoxical but it is true; if you are used to carrying a heavy burden of responsibility then adding on even more responsibility is not such a big deal. Alternatively, someone used to almost no responsibility to get them to do the slightest thing feels extremely difficult. I’ve noticed this in my own life (the busier I am, the more I can do, and the opposite is true) and in the lives of those around me. This quote by Librarian of Celaeno from here hits on this point:

   “It is also important to bear in mind as well that Boccaccio, a writer of the highest caliber, had a day job.  Like the Gen-Xers to come, he sold out and went into working world, taking up the family mantle of civic responsibility.  He went on important missions for Florence and performed a number of government jobs, including welcoming Petrarch to the city, beginning a great and influential friendship.  But he was never fully free to pursue his art, a fact true of nearly every artist then and up to the present.  Consider that greats like Brunelleschi and Michelangelo were businessmen working on commissions; their time spent managing staff and studios must have far outweighed their time with brush and chisel.  Even profoundly prolific writers like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were employed full-time as professors and had all the demands of family life (weirdly in Lewis’s case) as well.  Let this be a lesson to those of us who would be artists if we had more time; we always have time to do the things that are important to us.  The habits of industry and discipline mean as much as imagination and creativity.”

   Ryan Hunneshagen hits on a similar point on his post about the importance of embracing responsibility:

   Like any other muscle, the more responsibilities you handle, the more you can pile on. This is where it’s important to ‘rise to the occasion’. The reps where you grow the most strain you the most….

   I can’t remember the source of the quote, but I heard an anecdote of a young 20-something man walking into a job interview and making such an astute observation that he earned the job on the spot. He told the interviewer,

   “I’m a young man. And to become the man I need to be to succeed in life, I need to take on more responsibility to expand my capacity for it.” 

   The key to this quote is the young man’s recognition that his capacity is not finite. Each successive responsibility prepares you to fulfill the next one. This is where responsibilities yield compound returns, this is where they build that inertia I mentioned above. 

What I would really hate for myself is ending up an old man, living in poverty, in poor health, no family or children with the older generations having long since passed away and haunting my dreams as ghosts, friends dead or gone, with a world that has moved on and forgotten me, feeling unfulfilled, not having fulfilled my potential and wondering about what could have been. What a nightmare that would be.

Focusing on each aspect of the pie of life to try to achieve a balanced whole is the way to avoid this fate.

I hope this post is helpful toward reflecting as you try to balance your own life interests.

Thanks for reading.

1. Interestingly Kevin Spacey played John Paul Getty, but his role was recast and all of his scenes re-shot at great expense after Spacey’s sex scandal allegations broke into the media.