The Bullshit of Balance

We’ve all been there. Sacrificing sleep, family, friends, and worst of all joy trying to push just a little harder.

Those of us who have leaned hard into the enormous amount of touchy-feely social media rhetoric have tried (and often failed) to incorporate self care in all of its numerous forms in a vain attempt to bring balance to our lives.

But if you haven’t already figured it out, then let me give it to you in a nutshell...

Life isn’t balance, life is chaos

Does that mean we stop trying? Of course bloody not.

But real asshats grab on to the wellness bucket and chug the Kool-aid faster than you could blink.

Then they'll tell you if you're not already tanning your taint by moonlight on the solstice while administering near-arctic kale enemas and getting eight to ten hours of sleep then you're doomed to a life of burnout, misery, and mediocrity.

And quite possibly a much warmer butthole.

Balance is a lie we all tell ourselves.

Life doesn’t move like a yoga pose held in perfect symmetry. It moves like weather. Pressure systems. Long droughts. Sudden storms. Weeks of nothing followed by one brutal day that rearranges everything.

So when people sell “balance” as the goal, what they really mean is permanent equilibrium, and that’s not wisdom, it's denial.

Balance implies you can evenly distribute effort, attention, rest, ambition, love, and joy at all times. Anyone who claims they’ve achieved that is either lying, selling something, or seriously medicated to the gills.

Sometimes you sprint.
Sometimes you crawl.
Sometimes you obsess.
Sometimes you disappear.
Sometimes work eats everything.
Sometimes life eats you.

And that’s being alive inside a system that never stops changing.

The wellness-industrial complex hates the idea, because chaos doesn’t sell jade eggs and matcha tea. You can’t package “this month will be a mess, next month might be fine” into a carousel post with beige typography and a discount code.

So instead, they moralise your exhaustion.

If you’re burnt out, it’s not because you pushed too hard toward something that mattered. It’s because you didn’t optimise your morning routine with the perfect coffee blend and staring at your genitals for an hour.

🎉 Congratulations. 🙌
Your suffering and resilience has been rebranded as a total personal failure.

A lot of the people preaching life-balance are firmly standing on someone else’s chaos. A partner picking up slack. A team absorbing pressure. A safety net they didn’t build themselves. But they'll sure take credit for it.

Real life isn't about the bullshit of balance.
It’s about calibration.

You lean hard into one thing, then you correct.
You overextend, then you recover.
You push until something creaks, then you listen to what made the noise.

That’s feedback. And feedback requires honesty, not scented candles and cold plunges.

So don’t stop trying to take care of yourself. Just stop pretending there’s a final, stable configuration where everything stays neat forever like you're being sold.

Because it doesn't. There’s only movement. Adjustment. Trade-offs. Seasons.

Go live your life, do your best.

You'll probably be fine...