What if work and life became one?

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 that this should be our polarity. If we do not have work, then we should be seeking work, 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 world-shaking Covid-19 pandemic, and the lockdowns, have rocked our individual foundations as drones for the neoliberal economy of late-stage 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 take care of some personal matters. I can do the laundry, play with my child, listen to music or half-watch a series – as long as it’s not too mentally taxing.

This calls into question the entire matter of the work-life balance. Is it in fact 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 when they took place at geographically distinct locations. But this is no longer the case. Even after the pandemic recedes, many of us will continue doing our work from home.

Our children, too, have been learning from home. Schoolwork has also been liberated from being a finite, exclusive experience behind the school gates, and now sprawls, demystified, through our lives at home and across the hours of our days and weeks.

I assisted my seven-year-old daughter with a fascinating school project about how many leaves of various kinds there were to be found in our garden. We did it on Saturday at 10am.

I also transcribed a work interview in the middle of the evening, but offset this by doing my shopping at three in the afternoon and listening to the entire recorded works of Abdullah Ibrahim while typing.

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. Where does life end and work begin? That distinction is less clear when we no longer report to work physically at 8.30am and check out at five.

But given that this distinction is dissolving, perhaps we need to look at the mental idea of life and work within ourselves. Until now, not just our time, but our very selves have sometimes been split into these two functions – working and living.

Perhaps, as the logistics of working from home become more mainstream, and we no longer need to physically split ourselves and our personalities across separate spaces, we can integrate.

Perhaps work no longer needs to be our alter ego, the evil twin to the sincere and loving homebody who does the actual living on those couple of days when we’re not at work.

What if we found ways of working that expressed the values and beliefs of that loving homebody? What if that guy was able to work a bit, play a bit, and raise his kids a bit, and it all fitted together seamlessly?

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?

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