The Work-Life Balance Hoax

Most people don't realise that work is a legitimate and valid subset of life. Hence you cannot balance the two. What you need to do is balance work against non-work elements in life. If you try to balance life against work, it will fail.

How do we know?

Try doing this. Stand next to a wall that is at least as high as you are tall, so that you are upright and looking in a direction parallel to the wall. This will place one of your shoulders, and the outer edge of the foot on the same side, against the wall.

Now try to lift your other foot without falling away from the wall.

Simple physics and many other forms of reasoning will show that you cannot balance the subset against the superset — except in one case.

That case is when both sets are identical, which in this case would mean that either your entire life is work, or your entire work is life. This gives perfect balance.

Otherwise, accept that work is part of your life, and that you will die without it. But do other things with your life, so that you don't die OF work.

And remember: there is no such thing as 'work-life balance'.

Balanced

Last night (local time) I was watching the latest installment of the World Chess Championships. The first two games had been fairly exciting, not so boring, and drawn. But Game 3 was different; Kramnik-Anand (WCC Bonn) Game 3 is a kind of instant classic. You can find the game and supporting stuff here. But that isn't the main point of this post.

What I really admire about Anand is the way he pulls all kinds of rabbits out of hats. At the end of some of his games, you feel that odd sense of The Other. He is a guy you could enjoy bumming around with. But he is also this guy who plays extremely skillful lightning chess and ends up in positions that just don't look right.

Yes, he loses once in a while. Yes, he has pretty bad patches too, as in his previous tournament) where he came in last. But somehow, he seems to balance the normal and the excessively brilliant in a way many chess grandmasters are simply incapable of doing.

Just think of the Bulgarian archfiend Veselin Topalov, with bulging-eyed intensity and an almost vibratory anticipation of things to come. Just think of the once-fiery (and still fairly so) Alexei Shirov, or that political maverick from Baku, Garry Kasparov. Or even that great one, the totally unbalanced Robert James Fischer. The last two are heroes of mine, chessboard-wise. But I think I'd be uneasy to be sitting in the same room as either of them (well, the late Fischer much more so than Kasparov, I must admit). Not so Anand.

Footpr.._

Oh dear. It's been nearly two weeks since Gabriel Agbonlahor's fateful goal against Manchester United, and my right foot has forgotten how to cleave to the ground, as is the duty of a good Foot.

The word 'footprints' has ten letters, and as such, is a good proxy for description of the behaviour of my feet. As you can see from the title, the left foot's toes are all fine. On the right side, things are wrong.

Right big toe, among all the toes on that foot, is bearing almost all the weight. Or so I thought. Actually, it is bearing all the weight, because none of the other toes are touching the ground!

What's that, you say? Surely not levitation or some such flimflammery! No. It's just that the other toes, in sympathy with the last two (which are bound together, depressed - but not depressed enough, compressed, repressed, and oppressed) have decided to take a week off. I only noticed when a piece of paper slid under my right foot and went shooting through the gap.

No wonder there's so much strain on my knees, calves and thighs. The pronation is all wrong now. Sigh.