I used to take the same way to work every day. After a while you see the same faces again and again. Day after day. It was grinding. It can get awkward at times.
For example there used to be the same rough beaten up old van with a real asshole of a driver at least once a week in front of me. I saw him pulled over one morning, then he never showed back up.
I pass 20/30 cars on cue in the mornings and evenings. I just wonder about the people really. Occasionally I make up stories about their lives.
So does your pool of friends.
In college I never had a problem with too few friends. In fact it was the opposite for me. I hd too many friends and not enough time.
Well the time thing is still there, but the friends have become fewer. One thing that made a big difference was that the bulk of my friends were in my same program.
So I would hang out with them to do homework and study.
Maybe not the most exciting thing, but doing homework with your friends is an easy way to spend time together. I didn’t see the friends outside of my major quite as much, but would usually find time to go out with them on weekends. I essentially just lived on campus. I would get to campus around 7 in the morning and bring all my crap with me for the day. I’d dump it in a locker at the gym and do class, work, and the gym all day, then go home sometime between 5 pm and 2 am, depending on the day.
If you can, get a job on campus. This makes things so much easier. And it is better than commuting to a crappy job. You only have so much energy.
I'm not going to have time, energy, or desire for everything in my life all the time. The first step was to accept that.
There will not always be a balance. What helped me the most was to plan and schedule absolutely everything, schedule time to nap, grocery shop, etc.
One of my college friends told me once that being an adult, it's just too hard. "How do people do it," she asked me. Trust me, college is the easy part. Life is much harder, and you don't graduate to life until after you get your diploma.
Most people have other interests or hobbies that don't align with their current job.
Even if you enjoy your job, leisure time is still important. Besides, even if your job was the reason for your existence, if you're constantly stressed out, you'll burn out and not enjoy it any longer. So, even if you have no interests outside of work, you still need to find ways to lower stress and decompress.
For high-skill labor, the problem here is can be attributed to corporate culture.
Take Japan as a extreme example. They work some of the longest hours as proven by the chart and other sources. But, there is a culture where leaving work early is generally frowned upon even if your work for that day is done and staying at work late to creates the perception of being a hard-worker even if you are productively able to accomplish very little. This culture exists in other first-world nations as well.
I suppose part of the problem here is that many places management expects workers to "look busy".
THis leaves little time to actually contemplate a problem to find a solution. Often times I find that staring out of the window, going for a walk, or playing a mindless game for a little while. Allows my brain to process things in the background. If I have to "look busy" I might just be banging my head against the same mental wall without progress. But hey at least I "look busy" so obviously that means I am a hard worker.
Something else to consider, though, is that work-life balance isn't simply dependent on how much time you spend working.
One of the most common strategies that companies use to improve work-life balance are flex-time and flex-place policies.
A country with large populations of poor people are going to be working longer hours, or even multiple jobs, just to make survival wages. On the flip-side, you have a lot of the Nordic European countries, like Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, that are among best countries for social welfare programs that even allow the poorest to have a decent life and free education.
As the OECD explains it "Percentage of people who are wroking 50 hours or more a week on average for the past year". You can find more info and more details per country on the OECD page.
I am not the type of girl that likes going to the gym and showing off. It just never appealed to me and now that I have a husband, kids, and a career, it just seems silly.
But that doesn't mean I didn't want to stay fit.
In high scool I was in the cross country team and loved it. College is were I was introduced to tennis and now I do play but not enough to stay fit.
What I do have time for though is some exercise at home. And while the idea was attractive at first I really can't justify buying all of the home gym stuff. The space that it takes is well, yeah, wasted. And they cost a lot. This is what my home gym looks like. I have a yoga mat, exercise bands, weights, a pull up bar and an exercise ball (WebMD is where I learned a lot of my exercise ball exercises). A lot of times, exercise balls come with a little poster or booklet of workout ideas, but my mom gave me her ball and there was't a booklet along with it. It's worth having these things. It's cheaper and more convenient than going to the gym.
Most people I know who have bought stationary bikes/ellipticals thinking it would help them "save on gym membership" never used them and ended up giving them away/selling them. They never went to the gym that much to start with, they were hopeful purchases, they buy aspirationally, thinking they want to be the type of person who will use this stuff, but never actually do.
For me I am more motivated to use the basics and they are easy to get out, use, then put away. If you already know you'll be committed and disciplined enough to use it in most cases you don't need them.
Most equipment is cheaper than a year's woth of gym membership, though.
