Yesterday’s musings on work-life balance as opposed to that of life-work, got me thinking about another choice of words. Why don’t we say work-play balance instead? Isn’t the opposite of work more accurately ‘play’ than ‘life’? And wouldn’t the opposite then to pair with ‘life’, more accurately be ‘death’? Now some of us may feel work can be like death, but surely that’s not a happy way to live, or die for that matter.
Just semantics? Maybe, but I think certain word choices can speak to our subconscious selves. Work has come to mean something we have to do to support ourselves financially; something that but for the money, we generally would not choose to do. If we view such a big chunk of our lives, the employment portion of our time, as work, doesn’t that somehow make it worse? Make us feel more hard-done by? And even if we’re lucky enough to enjoy what we do to earn a living, we’re still not likely to call it play. Just think of how we feel when we say, “Oh, I’ve got to go to work now.” A chore, an interruption in our ‘real’ lives, the ‘play’ or ‘life’ side of that elusive work-life balance.
Work is defined as, “Physical or mental effort or activity directed toward the production or accomplishment of something.” Why is it then that we tend to only use the word to describe paid employment? We may say ‘we worked outside all day in the garden’, or ‘worked in the kitchen all afternoon cooking a special meal’, or ‘that you worked on a sweater that you’ve been knitting’. There are any number of similar activities that are work, things that require physical or mental effort and that produce or accomplish something. But doing any of these things, do we ever say we were at work? .
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We were working at something yes, but it’s not thought of in the same sense as how we spend our ‘work’ day. Is it because we’re paid for one, and that makes the difference? We don’t expect to get paid to do things we choose to do on our off-time. (Off-time…another interesting semantic quibble. I guess our job/work time is our on-time. Are we somehow implying one is more important?)
As for work, by our word choices, we sure seem to be admitting we don’t want to do the work we do at work, just the work we do at play. A reason I suppose they say, “Find something you love to do, and you never have to work again.” If it were always that easy to find. And actually being paid to do what you love is another challenge altogether. But let’s work at it…
