Work and life blend together

Hagen Engler

Regardless of the respective psychological conditions we each carry with us, it’s fair to say that we have lived in a bipolar world. Recent developments imply that may be changing.

The two poles of our personal worlds as citizens, until now, have been work, and home. This concept applies whether we are employed or not, because the capitalist ethos insists this should be our polarity. If we do not have work, we should be seeking it in order to re-establish the binary.

We work to live, we live to work. We do our living at home and we do our working at work. Even the navigation software on our smartphones knows this. Your two most important destinations are home and work. Everything else is just frippery.

Until now. The Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdowns have rocked our foundations as drones for the neoliberal economy of latestage capitalism. We have been reduced to a unipolar lifestyle: we live and work from home.

For me, this has shaken my entire view of myself. I no longer wake up and go to work. I wake up and work. At the same time, I am at home, so I can do the laundry, play with my child, listen to music or half-watch a series.

This calls into question the entire matter of the work-life balance. Is it acceptable to have these two priorities that need to be balanced, like the twin bulbs of a dumbbell? Should work and life be separate?

Of course, it made sense for them to be separate. But this is no longer the case. Even after the pandemic recedes, many of us will continue working from home.

I transcribed a work interview in the middle of the evening, but offset this by doing my shopping at three in the afternoon.

I also cooked up some chicken drumsticks and composed a song on guitar while I was technically supposed to be researching something about internal processes in the telematics industry.

These are all ways that the walls are coming down. The boundaries are beginning to blur.

What if there was no contradiction? What if working from home made us more coherent, what if our work reflected what we really believed in? Imagine if the work-life binary fell away, and there was just… life?