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The Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece titled Why Work-Life Balance Will Keep You Mediocre. Certainly a headline designed to draw ire from many readers, myself included. The author advocates ruthlessly optimizing your time, from missing important events with loved ones to declining social events. The goal? In his case, he built a company worth $20 million and set himself up with financial freedom for the rest of his life. My gut reaction was, Thats no way to live a life. There was a time, in my early twenties, when I poured all of my energy and time into my job. I wore the badge of long hours and unlimited availability, replying to emails long into the evening as I worked on projects. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/04\/workbetter-logo.png","headline":"Work Better","description":"Thoughts on the future of work, career pivots, and why work shouldn't suck, by Anna Burgess Yang. To learn more visit workbetter.media.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.workbetter.media","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}} Then I had kids. I began working remotely. In no way did this keep me mediocre. In fact, Id argue that work-life balance improved my career. Learning to focus my impact If you think you have 100 hours to work each week, youll undoubtedly find ways to fill 100 hours. When I became a parent, my extra time disappeared. I couldnt reliably work outside of business hours. Even my work within business hours changed, since small children are frequently sick or school is closed for various holidays. I became brutally efficient with my time. I learned to think of my work in terms of the results it produced, not the hours I put in. I advocated for better apps and tools at the company that could help the entire team do more with less time. I taught myself how to use automation tools to keep tasks humming in the background. Work smarter, not harder became my mantra. I wasnt willing to sacrifice time with my family or a career Id worked hard to build. I had to figure out how to get more done with less effort so I could enjoy a balance between work and life outside of work. Learning adaptability and empathy Being a parent taught me to be more adaptable. Kids dont wait for your schedule. They dont conform to your ideal workday. You have to pivot quickly to Plan B when Plan A fails. I became a manager early in my career, and Im now embarrassed to say that I was a very rigid thinker. I couldnt understand when life got in the way of work. I assumed that other people were bad at managing their time. Having kids made me more empathetic. I saw how life outside of workeven for reasons unrelated to childrenhappened, and deserved compassion. I wasnt mediocre by being more adaptable and empathetic. I became more human. The entire team benefited from flexibility. As a manager, I let my team know that I trusted them to get work done, without micromanaging oversight. And if something unexpected came up, we would adjust. Leading by example At work, people take cues from other employees, especially those senior to them. If a company claims to be flexible but your manager sends Slack messages while on vacation, its a pretty good indicator that you shouldnt expect any work-life balance. Or how about the job that provides zero coverage when you take time off? You return to a pile of work and spend the next week working extra hours to catch up. Not exactly restful if youre punished for taking time off with more work. The more I embraced work-life balance, the more my team followed suit. If my kids were sick (or I was sick), I took the day off. I took fully unplugged vacations during the year and encouraged others to do the same. We set up internal systems so that anyone taking time off had adequate coverage. Most importantly, my kids have seen how much I prioritize work-life balance. Im there to pick them up from after-school activities. They know that being sick means resting and recovering, not pushing through. When my son was little, someone asked, What do you want to be when you grow up? He responded, I want to work from home. It was a proud moment for me, because I knew that my efforts to model work-life balance were paying off. Do I have a multimillion-dollar business, like the author of Why Work-Life Balance Will Keep You Mediocre? No. But his priorities are just that: his prioritiesnot a universal truth. Pursuing work-life balance is a worthwhile career goal. Dont let anyone tell you otherwise. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/04\/workbetter-logo.png","headline":"Work Better","description":"Thoughts on the future of work, career pivots, and why work shouldn't suck, by Anna Burgess Yang. To learn more visit workbetter.media.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.workbetter.media","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}}
Category:
E-Commerce
When the Trump administration gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement access to a massive database of information about Medicaid recipients in June 2025, privacy and medical justice advocates sounded the alarm. They warned that the move could trigger all kinds of public health and human rights harms. But most people likely shrugged and moved on with their day. Why is that? Its not that people dont care. According to a 2023 Pew Research Center survey, 81% of American adults said they were concerned about how companies use their data, and 71% said they were concerned about how the government uses their data. At the same time, though, 61% expressed skepticism that anything they do makes much difference. This is because people have come to expect that their data will be captured, shared, and misused by state and corporate entities alike. For example, many people are now accustomed to instinctively hitting accept on terms of service agreements, privacy policies, and cookie banners regardless of what the policies actually say. At the same time, data breaches have become a regular occurrence, and private digital conversations exposing everything from infidelity to military attacks have become the stuff of public scrutiny. The cumulative effect is that people are loath to change their behaviors to better protect their datanot because they dont care, but because theyve been conditioned to think that they cant make a difference. As scholars of data, technology, and culture, we find that when people are made to feel as if data collection and abuse are inevitable, they are more likely to accept iteven if it jeopardizes their safety or basic rights. Where regulation falls short Policy reforms could help to change this perception, but they havent yet. In contrast to a growing number of countries that have comprehensive data protection or privacy laws, the United States offers only a patchwork of policies covering the issue. At the federal level, the most comprehensive data privacy laws are nearly 40 years old. The Privacy Act of 1974, passed in the wake of federal wiretapping in the Watergate and the Counterintelligence Program scandals, limited how federal agencies collected and shared data. At the time, government surveillance was unexpected and unpopular. But it also left open a number of exceptionsincluding for law enforcementand did not affect private companies. These gaps mean that data collected by private companies can end up in the hands of the government, and there is no good regulation protecting people from this loophole. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 extended protections against telephone wiretapping to include electronic communications, which included services such as email. But the law did not account for the possibility that most digital data would one day be stored on cloud servers. Since 2018, 19 U.S. states have passed data privacy laws that limit companies data collection activities and enshrine new privacy rights for individuals. However, many of these laws also include exceptions for law enforcement access. These laws predominantly take a consent-based approachthink of the pesky banner beckoning you to accept all cookiesthat encourages you to give up your personal information even when its not necessary. These laws put the onus on individuals to protect their privacy, rather than simply barring companies from collecting certain kinds of information from their customers. The privacy paradox For years, studies have shown that people claim to care about privacy but do not take steps to actively protect it. Researchers call this the privacy paradox. It shows up when people use products that track them in invasive ways, or when they consent to data collection, even when they could opt out. The privacy paradox often elicits appeals to transparency: If only people knew that they had a choice, or how the data would be used, or how the technology works, they would opt out. But this logic downplays the fact that options for limiting data collection are often intentionally designed to be convoluted, confusing, and inconvenient, and they can leave users feeling discouraged about making these choices, as communication scholars Nora Draper and Joseph Turow have shown. This suggests that the discrepancy between users opinions on data privacy and their actions is hardly a contradiction at all. When people are conditioned to feel helpless, nudging them into different decisions isnt likely to be as effective as tackling what makes them feel helpless in the first place. Resisting data disaffection The experience of feeling helpless in the face of data collection is a condition we call data disaffection. Disaffection is not the same as apathy. It is not a lack of feeling but rather an unfeelingan intentional numbness. People manifest this numbness to sustain themselves in the face of seemingly inevitable datafication, the process of turning human behavior into data by monitoring and measuring it. It is similar to how people choose to avoid the news, disengage from politics, or ignore the effects of climate change. They turn away bcause data collection makes them feel overwhelmed and anxiousnot because they dont care. Taking data disaffection into consideration, digital privacy is a cultural issuenot an individual responsibilityand one that cannot be addressed with personal choice and consent. To be clear, comprehensive data privacy law and changing behavior are both important. But storytelling can also play a powerful role in shaping how people think and feel about the world around them. We believe that a change in popular narratives about privacy could go a long way toward changing peoples behavior around their data. Talk of the end of privacy helps create the world the phrase describes. Philosopher of language J.L. Austin called those sorts of expressions performative utterances. This kind of language confirms that data collection, surveillance, and abuse are inevitable so that people feel like they have no choice Cultural institutions have a role to play here, too. Narratives reinforcing the idea of data collection as being inevitable come not only from tech companies PR machines but also mass media and entertainment, including journalists. The regular cadence of stories about the federal government accessing personal data, with no mention of recourse or justice, contributes to the sense of helplessness. Alternatively, its possible to tell stories that highlight the alarming growth of digital surveillance and frame data governance practices as controversial and political rather than innocuous and technocratic. The way stories are told affects peoples capacity to act on the information that the stories convey. It shapes peoples expectations and demands of the world around them. The ICE-Medicaid data-sharing agreement is hardly the last threat to data privacy. But the way people talk and feel about it can make it easieror more difficultto ignore data abuses the next time around. Rohan Grover is an assistant professor of AI and media at American University. Josh Widera is a PhD candidate in communication at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Category:
E-Commerce
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