The fiction of the life work balance.

 Dyersivlle, Iowa, circa 1912.  My grandfather came from here, and his parents and their parents lived their whole lives there, as part of the community.  Not as part of a "career" with a life/work balance.

I don't mean, if you, say maybe you wanna' care for 365 days, right? You ain't got 365 days. You got it for one day, man. Well I tell you that one day man, better be your life man, because you know you could say oh man you could cry about the other 364 man, but you're gonna loose that one day man, and That's all you got. You gotta' call that love, man. That's what it is, man. If you got it today you don't wear it tomorrow, man. 'Cause you don't need it. 'Cause as a matter of fact, as we discovered on the train, tomorrow never happens, man. It's all the same f*** day man.

Ball and Chain, Janis Joplin.

Some time ago, I posted this item on stress and the law in the career advice category:

Lex Anteinternet: Unsolicted career advice for the student No. 2: S...: Quite some time ago I wrote a couple of posts that are basically directed at people pondering the law as a career; one being a Caveat Aucto...

That article here came, as noted, shortly after somebody I had a case against committed suicide.  Quite a shock.  After that, indeed just right before it, I noticed that I started seeing a lot of articles on lawyer stress.  Maybe those articles were always running and I didn't take note of them, or maybe this is an example of synchronicity at work again.  Lots of these articles stress having a proper "work life balance."  Now, somewhat related to this, I've been seeing a number of articles recently that run counter to the vast amount of written legal material that  stress a proper "work life balance".  This is an interesting counter trend, and perhaps one that prospective lawyers should pay attention to.

I don't know how many other careers have advices on the proper "work life balance". I have to say that "life work balance" is one of those terms that strike me as sort of phony, so I'm probably not one who is ideally suited to comment on it.  I expand on that below. Anyhow, the basic gist of the commentary on "life work balance" is that there's a concern in the legal profession that a large number of lawyers are focused only on their work and their personal lives accordingly suffer.  A number of things are interesting about this.

For one thing, it's true.  I'm sure that all professions think this is the case for their lines of work.  Indeed, I've met people who seemingly have vast amounts of free time who complaint about being so busy at work.  On the other hand, I've met people from some professions where there's a genuine belief that people have high incomes and low hours where the opposite is clearly true. Dentist provide one such example. They go to work at some insanely early hour and keep on after most people's closing times.

With lawyers its very much the case.  At least it is in some branches of the law.  I frankly don't know about every area of the law, as one of the things about the law is that law is a career "field", not one single career house, so to speak. Lawyers who do one thing often don't know much if anything about lawyers who do something else.  So what I can say is that at least for people who handle litigation this is true. They basically never are totally away from work.

Family members of litigators, as well as other categories of lawyers, well know this, and any litigator who is honest will tell you this.  They miss family functions, work long hours, and are often absorbed in thought about their cases all the time.  They never really stop working, even when they aren't at work.  They consider their cases and their projects continually.  I found myself pondering something in a case, for example, while attending Mass the other day. Not a very admirable thing to do.  As a result, their home lives and families accordingly suffer.  And that relates to the topic linked in here. Essentially engaged in a mentally stressful activity all the time, they endure high stress.

 

Where I recently found myself pondering a legal topic, and shouldn't have been.

That's where the "work life" advice comes in, and every lawyer has read it. A proper "work life" balance is necessary, we're told. What this means is that we need to balance our time and effort at work with time and effort in the personal aspects of our lives. Again, taken no further than that, that is no doubt correct, if possible.

Recently, however, I saw an article by a long practicing lawyer that just flat out stated that wasn't possible.  Soon thereafter, I read a short biography in our local bar journal noting that a very long practicing lawyer I know strove for that, but didn't feel he really fully succeeded at that.  I suspect that last item is really on the mark.  Now, the ABA journal has run an on line article by a legal recruiter in which he flat out states:

Most attorneys that tell you they are concerned with their ‘lifestyle’ and ‘balance’ never really amount to much in the law, and that is OK, because not everyone is cut out for practicing law in a high-pressure environment,"

Not surprisingly, that comment is receiving a lot of commentary itself.  The ABA article has floods of comments from lawyers calling bull on the recruiters comments.  And not surprisingly, as it came in the ABA context, there are comments, again, discussing in this in the context of the legal White Elephant/Giant Unicorn, "Big Law", an institution that even most really big time trial lawyers don't experience.

As an aside here, I wish the ABA would get over this entire concept of "Big Law".  It may be just me, but I really think the "Big Law" they conceive of was an institution that last existed in the form they think of it some decades ago.  Almost ever issue of the ABA journal's email features some article about some Big Law firm laying off a drove of people.  As The New Republic explored some time ago, the "white shoe" firms aren't what they once were.  Far more lawyers of all types practice outside of Big Law than in it, and as a result, nearly ever discussion of "Big Law" expands out the definition until firms that probably wouldn't recognize themselves as "Big Law" are included in the discussion. It's time for "Big Law" as a term, to go the way that the term "The Big Three" did in regards to automobile manufacturing.

 

1954 Chevrolet sedan. A vehicle that has as much relevance to modern automobile manufacturing as "Big Law" does to the practice of law.

Well, anyhow, the comments all have their points, but what if the bigger truth is being missed. This may just be part of the territory, and the recruiter discussing it may be missing that point (he sees it in the Big Law/Harvey the Rabbit/Unicorn context as well).  That's something to be aware of.

Some jobs are just that way.  Not all are, although my guess is that all people believe that theirs are.  I think that the law is just this way.  It follows a person around, and not matter what a person does to have a balanced life, that's the case.  I think they need to do something, but achieving a "proper work life balance" probably isn't really possible.

Part of the reason for that, of course, is that the entire concept of a "work life balance" is bizarrely modern and fictional in and of itself.  Your work is part of your life, not something that can be balanced against it. Indeed, for males in particular part of a person's psychological make up is their "occupational identity" (women apparently have this as a feature of their psychological identity to a much smaller degree, which probably says something about our ancient origins).  The concept that over half your actual hours on the planet are not part of your "life" and must be balanced against it is frankly bizarre.

Indeed, that creates a bit of an illusion that there's who you are, and then there's what you do for a living.  That concept is a common one, but it's a fraud and people should be cognizant of that.  A person isn't what they do for work, but what they do for work is certainly part of who they are.  If they don't like that, they should consider that, as that's a fact.

Indeed, a rational "whole man" concept would have to acknowledge that, and when we look back at big figures who we admire in part for the wholeness of their lives, we can see where they'd achieved that. Taking again the example of lawyers, we have people like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, St. Thomas More. or Abraham Lincoln, all of whom occupied that profession but were so much more than that. They didn't achieve that more by balancing their "life" against their work, but rather by taking on their lives as a worthwhile whole.

 

St. Thomas More, lawyer, judge, author of Utopia, and principled opponent of King Henry VIII.  I doubt he pondered "work life balance".


Thomas Jefferson. lawyer, farmer, politician.  He had a nice life work balance, but I doubt that was because he'd been counseled to have one.

 Abraham Lincoln, a lawyer that many would consider to have a poor life work balance in modern terms.

This wouldn't mean, of course, that a person ought to surrender themselves to the office and ponder nothing else, although there are plenty of lawyers who do just that. Rather, what it means is that a person should realize that their life is their life and incorporate a worthwhile approach to their work and profession within that.  That isn't possible for every line of work in the same way.  In many, indeed most, lines of work a person is actually free to be more themselves and bring their strong loves with them, something that's an irony about a professional life. That is, for people who work jobs that fall outside this scope of things, lets say mechanics, or mail carriers, etc., their personality can be actually more reflected in their daily lives as nobody expects them to serve in the capacity of their occupation without end.  For people who are doctors or lawyers, etc., this isn't true and people will indeed both identify with you constantly in your profession, even where you with they wouldn't, and the profession will follow you around night and day no matter what.

Indeed, let me note that the fact that this topic even comes up is a pretty loud commentary on modern life, as there's something deeply bizarre, and wrong, about the idea that a person's work isn't their life and shouldn't be.  I've noted before that in many ways we've created a world that we're poorly suited to live in, by replacing a more  natural world of work with a glass and steel cubicle world (for which office walls are barely removed).  Here too, this is something really odd, as we're effectively conceding that we've created a condition in which half our lives are spent in conditions we don't want to regard as part of our lives.  They surely are, but what an odd concept.

 Stockman, usually we don't separate the personalities of farmers/ranchers from their work, but conceive of them all as one (oh wait. . . that cowboy is me).

That, I suppose, means that a person does have to have a concept that's in the same neighborhood as "life work balance", but because your profession will be a big part of your life, that balance concept is bunk, in my view. Rather, you have to incorporate the rest of your vocations and avocations into that life, which is the only life you are going to get.

Those who are looking at this topic, from either end, are I think in error in their approach. But that doesn't mean that they don't both accidentally have a point. For the "work life" balance crowd, your work is part of your life, and you can't balance one against  the other.  For those who say "bunk" to the concept, well, a person is more than their profession, and lawyers who are only their professions and nothing more are both boring and ineffective. Therefore, the real task is to bring that "other" into your profession.  But, and this is important, for those who conceive of a professional career as only a means of making money, or something that they can turn their minds and lives off when they work through the door, and turn them back on when they walk out, they may wish to reconsider their career options, as that can't be done.