It always baffles me whenever I read about life work balance. I’m not sure why, maybe it’s the way I interpret it. When I see this word, what comes to my mind is “Oh Work comes first before life? How does that really work because I’m unable to place it in my brain system?

Don’t we live before we begin to work? As children we live life/ experience the world, we share social exchanges with our family or the people around us, before we begin to want to work hard or understand the need to work before we go into work. However, as adults, it seems like everyone is on auto-pilot, they forgot they were once little babies who were helpless and all they could do is to survive; engage in waking up, eating, playing and sleeping. Now tell me, is living first or working first?

So it is very interesting how we literally think work should come before living or we think that work is more important than living. How does this even happen? We work so that we can live: in the sense that we want to meet our own needs at the basic level, meet our loved ones needs, and also achieve our wants; this includes, financial wants, abstract wants like fame, popularity and many others. We all know, these wants cannot be completely fulfilled as humans are alive, they would continue to have wants, and basic economics teaches that resources aren’t enough to fulfill wants, and honestly I think this is the reason for global poverty. When you continue to fulfill all your financial wants as you have them without self control, then of course the price has to increase, and not many people can cope with the price even for basic needs. This is another topic right here; which I will expand on in another blog post.

Let us all realign our priorities, needs of yourself and others are basic human responsibilities, before going to meet our wants, because we are social animals not individualistic animals. Living comes before working so that should be given more importance than work, if you are working just solely for yourself then you have lost what it truly means to be a human being. Even animals like lions share food together, so why should we work only for ourselves and therefore why should we put work before life. Literally and metaphorically speaking Life indeed comes before work. The etymology of life means to continue, to live: I think what this means in it’s basic sense is reproduction, which requires us to socialize, marry and reproduce however social relationships are seen as less important than work in today’s world, when both should be treated equally, we should understand that the importance of work is so we live, and not live to work, because that would remain an unfulfilled life.

Stay blessed as always, and let me know your thoughts.