Snippet

Change

Digital

Work

31 January 2025

4 min read

This weekend, find something better than the busy-busy

Get the life-work balance the right way round.

Jack Nicholson

Jack is a graduate of Peterhouse, University of Cambridge and Blackfriars, University of Oxford. He writes, and also works in local government.

Two people. sitting at a street cafe amid empty tables and chairs, are silhoutted.

Krisztina Papp on Unsplash.

It was 9.38pm and I was in the library connected to Pusey House, the Anglo-Catholic Chaplaincy where I have done much of my work over the last five years, when I submitted my pitch to write on ‘work-life balance’.

‘Work-life balance’ has been up for debate recently after British businessman and investor James Watt, co-founder of BrewDog, posted a video on Instagram in which he claimed that the ‘whole concept’ was ‘invented by people who hate the job that they do.’ He went on, ‘if you love what you do, you don’t need work-life balance, you need work-life integration’. Unsurprisingly, trade unions and large swathes of the population who are not multi-million entrepreneurs disagree.

For the record, I am not a multi-millionaire entrepreneur either. Yet I should say, I disagree too, even though lately I have taken on more paid work than I have ever taken on before – possibly, too much – and I am attracted by the notion that work and life should come together in some sense. In my life, they do. And the very fact that I pitched this piece late into the evening, having tended to several competing work commitments throughout the day, and feeling rather tired all told, would suggest that I am out-of-the-running to write a worthy-read about work-life balance traditionally conceived.

I also love what I do. I am in public service.

Nevertheless, I am uneasy about James Watt’s notion of work-life integration, and I certainly object to being told by him what I ‘need’ to thrive. Work-life integration is surely problematic if it suggests that they should be completely blended such that neither work nor leisure are afforded their proper place and given proper parameters. Watt is engaged to be married and, I would suggest, the right relationship between work and life-outside-of-work ought to be more like a marriage in which each is respected and persons involved are lifted onto an altogether higher plain.

Some boundaries are crossed in this process. Others remain. Life is not lost but changed.

This is why I do not work on Sundays. Sunday reminds me that work is surely an opportunity to go out to shape the world around us, serve it, or to ‘subdue it’ (to use a Biblical phrase). However, to subdue the earth is like as to tend the garden, in which we learn to restrain ourselves to produce greater bounty (life). The first man and woman were told by God, it is said, to ‘be fruitful and multiply’. So, multiplication – or integration – is not enough. And relatedly, there are some fruits in the Garden of Eden, in the story, which God tells Adam and Eve emphatically not to eat. Most fruit trees bear more fruit than they can support. They need to be pruned. So too do our working lives from time-to-time. Work-life balance matters in this sense.

Life-work balance, however, may be a more helpful phrase in so far as the ideal life entails work; work is not a distraction from it if approached in the right manner. In the twentieth century, two Christians I admire thought as much. C. S. Lewis wrote, ‘For most men Saturday afternoon is a free time, but I have an invalid old lady to look after [at home]’, a lady called Mrs Moore. He described himself as ‘Nurse, Kennel-maid, Wood-cutter, Butler, Housemaid, and Secretary all in one’. However, C. S. Lewis also wrote that ‘The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things’, the work, ‘as interruptions of one’s “own” or “real” life.’ They nourish it. They change it for the better.

That “great thing” requires serious effort, make no mistake. The writer Thomas Merton made a distinction between a contemplative life and a life of work and wrote this:

“When I speak of the contemplative life [...] I am talking about a special dimension of inner discipline and experience, a certain integrity and fullness of personal development, which are not compatible with a purely external, alienated, busy-busy existence. This does not mean that they are incompatible with action, with creative work, with dedicated love. On the contrary, these all go together.

They go together, but not in the way that Watt would have it because a busy-busy existence is exhausting, not fruitful. A life-work balance is. Life and work in this equation are not multiplied but respected as each offering our souls something they need: the opportunity to be loved and to love in how we engage with the world around us.

I was glad to have an opportunity to reflect on this, however late in the day.

Hating one’s job is certainly not a requisite for understanding this. If anything, I would suggest, it was invented by people, formed by Christian values, in the nineteenth-century who hated the common life they saw around them and went out their way to protect fellow men, women, and children from overwork.

The concept of work-life balance, or life-work balance, rightly conceived, goes to the very fibre of our being, and I for one think that it should stay.

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Article

Character

Comment

Leading

18 February 2025

4 min read

Carney’s call for character still resonates now more than ever

In both business and politics, the vocation of public service is at risk.

Emerson Csorba

Emerson Csorba works in deep tech, following experience in geopolitics and energy.

Mark Carney sits between two other speakers, holding a mic.

Mark Carney on the campaign trail.

On May 27 2014, a group of business, political and faith leaders gathered in London for the inaugural Conference on Inclusive Capitalism.

As a 23-year-old Masters student at Cambridge University at the time, it was a defining moment, this in the final months of my first stint in the UK. One of three young people invited, I had prepared carefully and waited impatiently in line in central London on a boiling summer evening.

The most poignant moment of the conference, in hindsight, was less the attendees or the historic venue, but rather a particular speech that I continue to reflect on a decade later.

The speech in question was one given by the then Bank of England Governor, the Canadian Mark Carney, and it was called ‘Capitalism: Creating a Sense of the Systemic’.

It was, and remains, one of the most impressive speeches I have heard, and whose message is as important as ever.

It is a message that Canadians today, as well as others living in Western democracies, need to hear as much as at any time in recent history.

In the wake of the financial crisis, Carney raised a point that is seldom asked in business or political circles - that of responsibility, and more specifically, of vocation. It is as follows:

"To build this sense of the systemic, business ultimately needs to be seen as a vocation, an activity with high ethical standards, which in turn conveys certain responsibilities."

And soon after: "It can begin by asking the right questions. Who does finance serve? Itself? The real economy? Society? And to whom is the financier responsible? Herself? His business? Their system?"

He references Michael Sandel, the philosopher who in his book What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets takes aim at the "skyboxification" of American life.

The example used by Sandel is taken from the sport of baseball. In the not-too-distant past, people from across all walks of life sat together in the stands, the low ticket prices allowing baseball to be the great unifier across divides.

Today? Expensive box seats see the rich and poor seated in different areas, the rich even physically above - looking down on - others. The same goes for ice hockey, soccer, or other sports which no longer see diverse families, across income levels, sitting together.

In short, if you impose a price on a good or increase the price of a good significantly (baseball tickets), the nature of value of that good changes, often irreparably so. Lost is a sense of fairness, and a reduction in the potential to repair divides.

In short, the idea of public service - that to be first, you must come last - seems increasingly bizarre to people.

We live in a world where immediate gratification and personal enrichment are particular cultural values. If there is any tell on the character of President Trump and his new White House, it is the launch of the Trump and Melania meme coins before the Presidential Inauguration: politics used for the advancement of personal interest.

In short, the idea of public service - that to be first, you must come last - seems increasingly bizarre to people. (A conversation with a young person several weeks ago struck me especially on this front, in which I had to explain that the purpose of politics is to serve others, not yourself.)

Carney's 'Creating a Sense of the Systemic' speech is therefore a reminder of what we need from political leaders: people who, outside of compelling rhetoric focusing on putting their nations first, actually consider their responsibilities toward others and who take these responsibilities seriously.

These responsibilities are vocations to which we are called. The responsibilities are not about us but rather are part of the system (made up of people and institutions) of which we are a part, and beyond.

In Canada, the potential election of Mark Carney as Leader of the Federal Liberals, and in turn as Prime Minister, is a step in the direction of a public service focused on responsibility and vocation. It is a step toward a more vocationally oriented public service, which our world needs. Whatever one's partisan affiliations, having political leaders acting with a sense of responsibility toward people and a higher calling beyond themselves is something we should embrace.

If Carney is to channel the same energy, poise and focus of this May 2014 speech, then there is a good chance the Canadian Federal Liberals win a future term. This is because our world is, deep down, yearning for political leadership based on real character, sense of purpose and responsibility beyond the self. But there is equally an opportunity for Pierre Poilievre to do the same, emphasizing the need for character, purpose and responsibility toward Canadians.