The Great Ape Approach to "Work/Life Balance"

In this episode, host Rick explores the true meaning of life balance by comparing human life to that of great apes, emphasizing that life is about relationships, health, play, wealth, and spirituality, not just work and personal life. He challenges the conventional work-life balance concept and encourages a holistic view of life’s many elements.

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Podcast Music: Positive Carefree Folk Pop
Artist: Burgberg
Used with Full Music Standard Lic.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

When you look at other apes such as chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, gorillas, you look at these animals and what life is about. Life is about the relationships that they have with each other in the troupe. Life is about food and securing safe places to sleep and nap, whether to make a nest or whatever it might be. It is about the dynamics that might occur within the individual families and the bigger troupe itself. There is playtime set aside for the little ones. They are allowed to play and have fun, and the adults will sometimes even engage in that play as well. So life for them is a wide variety of things that they are constantly ebbing and flowing. But yet when it comes to humans, we're told it's a work-life balance. You balance work and life. And that is the only two things you get to try and balance. I disagree. Over the years, my curiosity and experiences, along with the many people I have worked with, revealed to me we all have a desire to feel connected to the natural world. You're listening to Animals, Nature and You, a podcast that explores a connection between animals, nature, and humans. A podcast that celebrates learning more, following our curiosity, and reconnecting with the natural world. Welcome to another episode of Animals, Nature and You. And this particular one, of course, is a 10-minute Tuesday. And it is a look back to the conversation we had last Thursday with Elizabeth Johnson. We had a great conversation about her podcast, Mother and Wildlife, discussing also to the concept of work-life balance. And that is a big deal. And I get it, it's a catchphrase that is in our vernacular, it's in our culture here, that you have to balance out. You can't just be a workaholic. You've got to other parts of your life you have to balance out with work. And you also then have to find that, particularly in that conversation with Elizabeth, we talked about moms and work. And specifically in the zoo world, animal care is an emotional, mental, physical job, whether you're a parent or not, because you're caring for other living things and because you're with them so much, you tend to have an emotional and mental attachment to them, like you would in your own family, honestly. And you're also physically involved. Then if you are a mom, you get pregnant, your body changes, there's other demands on you physically and mentally and emotionally, and there's this tug of war she talks about in the conversation, which is a great conversation. If you haven't listened, go back and listen to that episode after this one. It's a great topic. And we also talk about dads too, because dads have similar but different uh challenges as well when it comes to the zoo and animal care world. But what came up in that conversation was the idea of the work-life balance. And that is something I have taken issue with since I had my fall apart back in 2020. Now, it just happened to coincide with the pandemic. It wasn't caused by the pandemic, but I was working incredibly ridiculously long hours at work, would come home, eat, and then continue working until bedtime, get up after about five hours of sleep and do more work, have some breakfast, go to work, work, and that went on five, six days a week. And um there were other elements and things going on in my life that continued to just spiral and throw things out of whack. And it would be quick and easy and dirty to go, you screwed up your work-life balance, Rick. I yes, on the surface, yes. But I would like to bring up the fact that when we only look at work-life balance, I think we're gonna have a hard time really finding true balance because life is not just work and then everything else. We need to in our modern times, and I I can say this with confidence because I did the dirty work, I got my hands dirty, I fell down the rabbit hole, I took all sorts of courses, I worked with other people who've gone through this process, I went through this process. And the reality is our current culture, I believe, leans heavily into you have your work life and your own life, and the those things are where you need to find balance. And my experience showed me that no, work is one element of many parts of your life. Your life, it is it. That's it, that's all you get. There's not work life and then life, it's your life. And you need to look at it's your responsibility to take care of yourself. You need to look at the relationships in your life. That's one element. And under that element, then there's personal, immediate, intimate relationships. There's family relationships with siblings or parents or cousins, there's the chosen family, then there's friends, there's close friends, there's peripheral friends. That all is under one element. Then there's your health. Are you doing things to make sure you stay healthy, or are you just assuming because I'm not dead yet, I must be doing okay? And then you don't really think about your health until you get sick. That is a whole thing to think about. And then that goes under how's your sleep? How's your your intake of nutrition? What it what quality is it, right? So that's we have relationships, we have then your health. Then what about play? Are you balancing out enough in your life to find elements of play? And for everyone that's different. Don't get suckered into you must go to a party or you have to go out dancing, or you play for you might be going out and touching grass. Going play for you might be bird watching. Play for you might be going out to the club or hosting a big barbecue or going to a picnic. But the point being is you have to figure out what it is for you. And that's another element. Okay, so we have relationships, we have your health, we have playtime. What about your wealth? And I know a lot of people in the animal care world are laughing wholeheartedly right now because we don't make a lot of money in conservation, you don't make a lot of money in animal care. In fact, you're probably in debt. But without your wealth being without you being mindful of your wealth, you also run the element the elements, listen to me, you run the possibility of not having balance in your life because you cannot take care of your health. You cannot go play, you cannot take care of those in your family if your wealth is deteriorating into debt. Now, that doesn't mean, well, I'm in debt right now, I'm I'm a mess, I'm it's over for me, I'm done, I give up. It means it's time to start paying attention to those things as well, not just work and life. And last but not least, I would even challenge you to consider your spirituality as something to balance in your life. Now, spirituality for you might be strictly scientific, and that is okay. It might be, I don't know what it is, but I know when I go outside and touch a tree or walk by a tree or see a bird, I feel something, or it might be a very specific religion. Whatever version of that might be, or it might be just quietly talking to myself. I don't know, whatever it might be, that's still part of the equation of the human life and the human experience. There's plenty of data out there. If you're very scientific-minded, there's plenty of data out there about how those that are spiritual and or in some any form of spirituality or attached to some religion, have uh different elements of their life of being able to survive certain situations mentally, emotionally, physically. Uh it's just a it's an incredible can of worms if you want to open it up from a behavior standpoint. But my point being, when we hear the term work-life balance, it is not work and life. Work is one of many things. Relationships. It's not work and relationships only. It's work and relationships and your health and your playtime and your spirituality and your wealth. The reason this topic is important to a 10-minute Tuesday on a podcast called Animals, Nature, and You is because the you aspect has become sort of a focus of these last couple episodes. And we have another episode coming up, probably about two weeks, I think. Uh well, it's a Thursday episode, so a little less than two weeks. And it is going to lean heavily into the taking care of you side of things from those that are in the animal care world, similar to mothering wildlife, talking about the mothering side, being a mom in this realm. These are important topics. Animals, nature, and you was developed and thought of because I leaned heavily into animals and nature when I was learning how to take care of myself, when I hit my massive burnout and realized I needed to figure out exactly what is this work-life balance. And going through that process, I realized that like our friends, the orangutan, the chimpanzee, the bonobo, the gorilla, and all these many other species, life is not just life and work. And when we take away, when we we take away just the either-or, this balance, and we look at all the elements, it sometimes can seem a little um overwhelming. I heard one or read one analogy once where it was in all these aspects of your life, there are sub-aspects. So, like relationships being another example, these elements of life, excuse me. And it's our responsibility to make sure that we are able to juggle these. And like, wow, that's a lot to juggle. But that's that's the reality of life. But the other part of our responsibility of learning how to juggle these things is to also recognize which one of these things that we're juggling is made of crystal and which is made of rubber. In other words, if I'm juggling all of these things and one should slip, it will shatter. It will permanently change how this element lives in my life. Versus if it's made of rubber or plastic, it won't break. It'll bounce and it will be okay and I can pick it back up. And that is to reflect that sometimes these elements of our life, some get less attention than others. And I think especially when we first step into our career, as we're trying to prove ourselves and prove to ourselves we can do it, we really focus heavily on our work element and the other things can slide away. And I know for sure, I can say for a fact, in the animal care side of things, the allowing family and relationships to slip away happens quite easily because we need to work on weekends and holidays and birthdays and things like that, no matter what the weather is, crazy hours because our animals need our care. That's not to say that, oh, you should walk away or the animal care world shouldn't be that way, because the animals do deserve the best and proper care. But it's our responsibility to go, okay, I do that, that part of it, but what can I also then take care of elsewhere instead of a focus only? And to what to what Elizabeth said, there are different seasons in your life. There is a season of only focusing, maybe perhaps 80% of yourself on work and 20% on the other elements. But as seasons change and grow, you need to also reevaluate that. So thank you for joining me and putting up with my my little 10-minute Tuesday today that's not about animals, not about wildlife, but it's about you. It's about taking care of you and kind of shaking up that concept of work-life balance and realizing there's a lot more to our life. And if you look at our animal friends, often we can be reminded of the fact that as humans, sometimes we don't always get it right. Okay, with that, I'm gonna wrap it up. I do want to remind you, if you haven't already, please hit subscribe or follow wherever you listen or where you're watching this podcast. Every Tuesday's at 10 minute Tuesday, we tend to focus mostly on animals or reflect back on a topic that was brought up in an interview. And then Thursdays, we have our long form interviews with some awesome guests doing some awesome work. If you want to get a hold of me, there's a fan mail link in the episode description wherever you're listening to your podcast, or you can find me on social media. All my links are down below. Animals Nature and You is on Instagram too. If you want to connect there or just follow along, see what's going on. My website, zoology rick.com, is also down below. So with that, we are going to wrap this up. Have a good one, everybody.