A four-day workweek is being touted as better, especially for jobs that are cognitively oriented. The brain needs more time for rest and relaxation than a five-day workweek allows, so four days of work and three days for everything else will provide a work-life balance.

For more than two decades, particularly after I had my first child 17 years ago, I’ve been trying to achieve that elusive work-life balance. I used to be ashamed to have always fallen short, battling an internalized sense of inadequacy akin to impostor syndrome: an inchoate feeling that if I was “better,” “stronger,” or “smarter,” then balance would not be a mirage.

I’ve come to realize that work-life balance is a lie.

Work-life balance implies that there is a magic formula, a certain amount of time spent on work and each task that I need to do, in any given moment, hour, day, week, month, year, and so on. If I successfully spend just that amount of time, I will have enough time left over for everything else that pops up.

This is superhuman.

For one thing, we cannot always predict what is in store for us. I might think I have achieved balance, one that is ultimately precarious and too easily upended with one viral illness (or a worldwide pandemic like COVID), one argument with a friend (or a divorce), one extra last-minute meeting (or a promotion) (which should be a good thing, right?).

On top of that, the phrase “work-life balance” implies to me that work is on one side of the scale with the rest of life on the other. Yet each of us has only one life, and work is contained within that life. And for someone like me who has the privilege of working outside the home, work is something that I choose to do. For me, work creates meaning in my life. For me, then, “work-life balance” suggests that I am balancing a certain amount of meaning (work) with the rest of my life. For others, “work-life balance” might mean balancing work, which does not necessarily have meaning but pays the bills, with the obligations and pleasures of the rest of life – indeed, Tim Ferriss’ The Four-Hour Workweek maps out a plan for how we can all literally work just 4 hours and have 164 hours/week left over for living. Perhaps that sounds ideal to many, but for me as a physician, a four-hour workweek is not practical.

Viktor Frankl, in Man’s Search for Meaning, promotes that there is a Freudian will to pleasure, an Adlerian will to power, and his own will to meaning. For pleasure seekers, pleasure is supreme, and for those who find pleasure in work, just four hours of work might seem paltry. Pleasure seekers who do not enjoy work are in search of other sources of pleasure. For power seekers, and I would include my younger self in this category, power reigns supreme. Control and seeking achievement fall in this category of power; to me, inclusive of controlling time and the concept of “work-life balance.” Power can be found in grades and test scores, a desired school or job, or outcome. In contrast to a will to pleasure and will to power, which, according to Frankl, are ultimately empty shells, one’s will to meaning is what truly matters – how do you really want to spend your life? Meaning is only answerable by an individual. Each of us must find one’s own true north.

Meanwhile, there is “true north” and “magnetic north.” A compass is literally pulled by magnetic north, and to find true north, about 1200 miles of correction is necessary. Work, pleasure, or power often stand in as a reasonable magnetic north, but none of those things are true north. Moving toward true north requires self-reflecting and correcting toward what holds meaning for you.

Work-life balance does not exist, but a work-life compass is helpful to me as a powerful analogy for all that I can be distracted by and pulled toward, good and bad, potentially missing what is most meaningful or, conversely, getting quite close. I might lose my way for a bit, deliberately or due to some error, but I can always reset. I might move in various directions and know, ignore, or miss my true north.

Work-life balance will never become reality for me, but a work-life compass is something I can use.

Christine J. Ko is a dermatopathologist.