Blurring is nothing new!
It’s tempting to associate the issue of work encroaching on home life with recent tech innovations. We’re online all the time with the internet in our pockets, and digital jargon calls that ATAWADAC, or anytime, anywhere, any device, any content. It’s what happens when you check your emails from a cable car while skiing, when you finish up an e-learning module from a sunlounger on the beach, or take a break to watch a sketch by your favorite comedian on your office desktop computer.
But blurring is nothing new. For a very long time, it was actually a normal way of life. And things have never changed for most farmers, traders, and artisans, who most often live and labor in the same place, work as a couple or even as a family, and whose social life is closely intertwined with their business.
The creation of salaried employment during the Industrial Revolution changed things somewhat, effectively creating a separation between time “owed” to the employer and “free” time. But in the 19th century, the paternalistic Western model kept work and home life closely connected by housing employees on factory grounds and offering family facilities and leisure activities where they lived and worked.
The invention of “private life”
In reality, it wasn’t until the end of the Second World War that privacy became both officially and fully recognized as a right for everyone (and enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights) and a “way of life” in its own right.
This “invention” of private life stemmed from a series of overlapping changes: the rise of suburban-style housing, which also shaped the layout of apartment blocks to create a more “home-like” feel; economic growth and full employment, which shifted the balance of power between employers and workers and reshuffled social values; new labor laws that reduced working hours and “freed up” space for people to have more than just a work/rest routine; and the growing number of women in the workforce, which brought attention to the previously overlooked issue of domestic labor, and with it, the broader challenge of balancing different aspects of life. What started out as a question for half the workforce has gradually become an issue for everyone.
When it was possible to “cut up” time
Time out! From the 1950s, work began competing with other interests. This raised an issue: there weren’t enough hours in the day. Until the late 1990s, the equation was relatively simple: work time and leisure time were separate. There were times when people were at work and not available for other activities. And making a personal phone call was out of the question, other than in exceptional circumstances and with prior authorization. People booked half a day off work to stay home for someone to come and read their electricity meter. Family concerns had to be left in the cloakroom when they arrived at work. Perhaps a few people would have a family photo on their desk.
In return, nobody would bother you outside working hours. Evenings, days off, and vacations were sacred. Some people would occasionally have to work late, but once they were home, their job was finished.
Can we separate work and home?
In reality, this temporal separation has its limits. Since the 1980s, sociologists and psychologists have been highlighting the permeability of times and spaces. Theorists of the school of human relations, including Abraham Maslow, to whom we owe the famous pyramid of needs, emphasize that when faced with certain dissatisfactions and/or emotions, humans are not able to manage a conscious agenda. For example, the feeling of safety is particularly vital, and cannot be easily separated between work and home life. Whatever the cause, feelings of insecurity are likely to have the same damaging effects on both work and home life. The same goes for self-confidence, which is rooted in various dimensions of our personality and our journey and whose balance cannot be tipped heavily towards one aspect of existence and left wanting in others.
Sociologist Monique Haicault completed the picture in 1984 by coining the expression “mental load”. Even when we consciously divide our time and spaces, our brains aren’t able to pigeonhole our concerns!
In other words, it is an illusion to believe that someone can “be a different person” depending on whether they are at work or elsewhere. Yes, we can certainly put on masks, take on roles and “play the game”. But that means losing our authenticity, which has an impact on our physical and mental health, our relationships, our commitment and our resilience.
Work-life porosity
The debate on whether or not it is possible to draw boundaries between the spaces and times in our existence has been rife since the beginning of the 2000s, when we suddenly all became reachable round the clock. We all feel it. Just having a smartphone, an internet connection or a laptop is enough to blur the lines throughout our day. And now that we are familiar with the idea of working from home, there is no longer any real doubt: wherever we are, we are potentially at work, while be potentially at home.
Blurring doesn’t just mean working from home or dealing with personal matters at work. It also reflects a broader merging of social spheres. We’ve never spent so much time with people from similar socio-professional backgrounds, both during the so-called work hours and in our personal lives. It’s how we network, especially on social media, where we present ourselves in a spectrum of personal and professional tones, with one eye on our own branding. It’s also in the rise of personal development practices, which are as much about wellbeing as they are about boosting productivity.
Sustainable blurring
What about the right to disconnect? The measure is clearly necessary, both to protect against the excesses of unscrupulous or overly demanding employers, and to guard against the risk of overcommitment by workers who are unable to stop until they’ve passed the point of exhaustion.
But we have to face facts: legislation is simply chasing after what looks like an anthropological shift. It’s difficult to imagine returning to a 1960s or 1970s-style separation of spaces and times.
Also, the question we should ask is not so much how do we re-establish our boundaries, but rather how do we achieve sustainable blurring? Because in absolute terms, blurring isn’t a bad thing, it is even consistent with how our minds work naturally. We are whole beings who exist holistically. We reason by associating ideas, we know how to transpose acquired knowledge from one experience into the practices of another, we experience emotions which by definition are not “manageable”, and there is nothing natural about a divided life.
But we can’t be available all the time. Because there are only 24 hours in a day. Because our brains cannot make more than 6 or 7 conscious decisions per day. Because our body needs sleep, as well as frequent changes of pace, between moments of intense activity, moments of less intense activity and moments of inactivity. We don’t necessarily need more limits, but more space and time to do things, to experience relationships and to acquire knowledge.
So let’s keep blurring, while respecting how our minds and bodies work naturally.
Marie Donzel, for the EVE&Octave web magazine
