Around 1 year and a month ago I started working in Japan. Perhaps many of you have heard on the harsh conditions of long working hours in Japan and incidents of suicide by death and other such depressing stories. Being faced with such a possibility I put myself in a staunch position to maintain a clear distinction between personal and work life and not to let one or the other, particularly the work aspect, negatively impact on the other. And of course this is what many of us refer to as work-life balance, maintaining an equilibrium between work and personal life. But there’s more to this than simply about work-life balance.

After establishing my stance on my work-life balance, I started to think about all kinds of balance in life, having realized how important it is in general in our lives. As an example, during people’s daily work, we have a stack of to-do list everyday and sometimes I would need to find the balance between, in terms of time spent, working on task A compared to all other tasks. As another example, when we buy products many of us would weight in between the price vs value of a service or good. Yet in another example we talk about maintaining a balanced diet for our health. It would seem that balance is quite prevalent in our life.

A quick skim of balance led me to the believe that balance is important and prevalent in our life, which leads me to the question: how well are we at creating, identifying and maintaining balance? I’m asking this not so much on the perspective of human’s innate ability but more so on our surroundings. A lot of our time is spent in improving ourselves or just doing a small set of core activities, and there are advices to continue doing so. Just as an example, there’s quite a lot of advices to maintain focus in order to get into an Ivy League school, like here or here. On the other hand many of us grew up in an environment in school that exposed us to all kinds of activities by having us take a diverse set of subjects in 12 years.

Yet again at work and at other times we are asked to focus and present the main points, while in the process of focusing on the main points we are asked to consider alternatives, balancing our view points. We’re told to find and focus on the things and people that matter, at the same time we’re told by articles to travel and explore and find something new to do, to be adventurous. People want us to be nice, but at the same time we shouldn’t make ourselves exposed to danger. In showing these examples I think there is one thing that we can consider: we have a love with balance and at the same time we have a love in focus. And between our love for focus and our love for balance, we have the meta question of how do we balance between the two?

I might not have a universal answer to the question, but I do believe that a possible answer is that that each of us not only have a common sense of balance but also a personal sense. My sense of work-life balance is most likely not the same as Elon Musk, who just made another venture into a brain-computer company and still managing 3 other companies. Your sense of good to safety balance is probably not the same as mine as people have different levels of good they are comfortable in displaying. What I think is balanced may not necessarily be what you think is balanced. A lot of it really comes down to identifying and being aware of personal value and adjusting as needed. It’s more of a part of the art of living than it is the science of living. That’s my take.

There are certainly a lot of talk about focus, and a lot of talk about balance, and sometimes one will prevail over another out of necessity but there are also times we would need to balance between the two. In between the myriad of advices for such situations I just think there is little talk in reconciling the two. Having being so conscious on balancing my own life made me realize the relevance of it and how it is so intrinsic to our lives, because if you go over some of the examples I gave a lot of balancing we do is for the sake of maximizing or minimizing results, something we humans put a lot of attention into. The sense of balance you have now may not be the best it can be, but I think if only we can identify them we put ourselves in a better position to create a balanced life by simply being aware of it. Cheers to a personally balanced life.