Finding a balance in the unbalance
By Max Rashbrooke
Taking our political cues from the musings of wellness bloggers: what an odd idea. But coronavirus has already turned so many things upside down. Why not one more?
Despite the abundance that surrounds us, our twenty-first-century lives seem perpetually out of balance. As a society, we entered lockdown with a seriously unbalanced distribution of resources, one that left hundreds of thousands of people without the income needed for a decent life. Our species was also grossly out of balance with the planet, a fact evidenced not just by runaway climate change but also by our polluted streams, plastic-waste stockpiles and mass extinctions.
Even our individual lives have been unbalanced. This is felt most fiercely by the poorest New Zealanders: people working erratic shifts, barred from planning ahead, barely seeing their children, unable to commit even to coaching a Saturday rugby team; people on benefits walking a tightrope as they cope with damp and mouldy housing, dangerous neighbourhoods and byzantine welfare systems. The middle-class experience of imbalance is undoubtedly less severe. But it still leaves people rushing from place to place, never quite keeping up, working too much, failing to connect deeply with friends, families and fellow residents.
Lockdown just created further imbalances. After rushing everywhere, people were suddenly forced to go nowhere. Except, that is, for essential workers, under pressure like never before. Even non-essential workers stuck at home with the kids just about went mad. Lockdown life was complex, of course. Some families felt more balanced: freed from pressure to over-consume, able to take the kids biking every day. But the underlying situation hadn’t changed. Confined to our houses, we were no more able than before to strike the right balance between work, home, and community activities.
Environmentally it was no better. Carbon emissions dipped slightly; streets became quieter, birdsong easier to hear. But only thanks to a mass suspension of liberty and life opportunities. That’s why the social media “grief” for the deserted streets of lockdown struck such a wrong note: it was a lament for something that represented the disappearance of tens of thousands of jobs and the destruction of beloved businesses. Moments of balance – with family, with nature – were purchased with vast imbalances elsewhere.
Some people are surprised by the lack of sweeping changes, so far, in the response to covid-19. But as the conservative commentator Liam Hehir has argued, this isn’t a crisis of capitalism, or a rejection of the old world. Markets by themselves couldn’t cope with the virus, sure. (You can’t trade your way out of a public health emergency.) But they didn’t cause it, at least not in any immediate sense that the public perceives. And in contrast to the disruptive, destructive lockdown, the familiarity of the old normal, unbalanced though it was, looks reassuring.
What does all this tell us? That although sweeping change may not be in prospect, there is still a political opening for a discussion about balance and harmony in people’s lives. And this is where the wellness industry comes in. Globally, $4.5 trillion was spent in 2018 on wellness products and services, a veritable avalanche of workouts, supplements, sleep apps, meditation practices and mindfulness courses. Although the men’s wellness industry grows apace, it is predominantly women who consume these products. And they are an odd mix. Mindfulness has a rigorous evidence base behind it, and makes some sense; Goop’s Psychic Vampire Repellent does not. Nonetheless the wellness industry seeks to address people’s profound sense of disharmony, of a lack of balance in their lives.
Many people, especially those committed to fixing structural injustice, dismiss wellness as an individualist band-aid on a bigger problem. And that's partly true. But this misses a couple of points. The first is the explicitly political, though well-hidden, roots of the wellness industry. As Taffy Brodesser-Akner points out in her perceptive New York Times portrait of Gwyneth Paltrow, “The minute the phrase ‘having it all’ lost favor among women, wellness came in to pick up the pieces.” Wellness, in other words, took off when mass female entry into the workforce failed to deliver all its promised benefits, especially for those women still left doing most of the housework. More broadly, both men and women now lead supposedly fuller, more efficient existences, with higher living standards, and yet are somehow left unsatisfied.
Second, we shouldn’t ignore what the wellness craze points towards: the longing for harmony and balance that is now central to many people's vision of the good life, and arguably always has been. At the Ancient Greek temple of Delphi, the site of the famous Oracle, there was inscribed the motto, “Nothing to excess.” Most societies have stressed the need for balance in some form. In modern-day Aotearoa New Zealand, the legal scholar Moana Jackson, in the recent book Imagining Decolonisation, describes tikanga as “a relational law based on an ethic of restoration that seeks balance in all relationships”.
This suggests that the desire for balance and harmony should not be dismissed. And we can argue that rather than being things an individual has to achieve alone, they are in fact substantially realised at the social level. An inner balance can be mirrored by – indeed, relies upon – some kind of balance in the broader world. This argument allows us to draw a long causal chain, one which starts with listening, with understanding why people seek out well-being remedies, but which connects those concerns to wider structural forces.
Take, for instance, one common source of stress for low- and middle-income households alike: excessive working hours. While some people love their jobs and the length of their working week, many either do not or would simply like more time to spend on other pursuits. Time, and our perceived lack of it, is understandably a modern obsession. I remember an Australian pollster telling me years ago about interviewing voters attracted to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party; they had talked repeatedly of how little time they had, how stressed and compacted their lives felt.
Rather than xenophobia, or mindfulness courses on how to remain “present”, a more structural solution to these problems would be a four-day working week, an idea recently floated by prime minister Jacinda Ardern. But we have to go still further into the substructure. Wages are far too low for many families; earning four-fifths of an already inadequate salary does not sound like much fun. So at the very least, we would have to emulate the Perpetual Guardian model, in which staff retain their previous pay despite working one day fewer.
It is doubtful, though, that all employers would be so open-minded, or that all five-day jobs could easily be done in four. Nor would this really solve the modern problem of both parents having to work full-time when they would both rather be part-time, so as to enjoy less stressful home lives and a closer connection to their children. Although it is sometimes argued that there are more two-earner families because we expect a higher standard of living, surveys tend to show that many important things – like buying glasses or seeing a doctor – have not become easier to afford in recent decades. The more likely culprit is our unbalanced distribution of income.
In the last few decades, the share of company revenues going to business owners has risen from about 40% to 50%, with a corresponding fall in the share going to staff salaries. The average wage is now $11,500 lower than it would be if staff had maintained their share of revenue. And among salary earners, pay rates for senior managers have far outstripped those for frontline staff. No wonder low-paid staff, trying to keep up, have substantially increased their hours since the 1980s. Rising rents and mortgages, the result of a dysfunctional and unbalanced housing market, also force them into a longer working week. Meanwhile the ongoing stress of being poor and lacking control over their working life does enormous damage to people’s health, as the groundbreaking work of the neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky has shown. These are all problems that can be tackled only at the structural level: through the widespread adoption of the Living Wage, through regulations that curb precarious work practices, through the expansion of state housebuilding, through planning reforms that allow cities to build more houses more densely.
We have now arrived at the end of a long causal chain. We started with people’s sense of being harried, time-poor, out of sync with their community – and ended with fundamental questions about power, housing and salaries, questions that open up a space for political change. We have shown how a personal imbalance derives, in part, from a structural imbalance. This approach builds on, rather than dismisses, the changes people are already making in their personal lives. Instead of a "no but" strategy ("No, you may be trying to be mindful, but the structural issues are more important"), it demands a "yes and" approach: "Yes, it's great you're taking some steps in your own life – and have you thought about the wider picture?"
Of course there are caveats. Balance cannot be the sole aim of politics; there is no one virtue to rule them all. And a new politics of time, which is what this would require, would have to be carefully handled, lest it turn into a conservative move to get women back into the kitchen. But that conversation is happening already: all the more reason for us to shape it in positive ways. The ideal is surely not that the genuine gains of the last few decades be unwound, but that partners of all genders can balance the demands of paid work, caring, and other activities in an equal and democratic way, both doing less paid work if they so choose.
Such an idealised world would depend on other, still wider changes. So much of our sense of imbalance and failure comes from our constant striving against others, whether we are the middle-class office worker whose career hasn’t met expectations or the poor breadwinner feeling stigmatised by those with greater wealth. Specific policies to promote balance would have to be embedded in a worldview that privileges cooperation over competition, societal and environmental well-being over the simple pursuit of economic growth.
Our political and economic settings would have to adjust accordingly. Much of the pro-market thinking of recent decades has been underpinned, ironically, by an idea of balance. In the ideal world of neoclassical economics, markets reliably reach an equilibrium in which demand and supply are perfectly balanced, prices adjusting seamlessly so that firms deliver just enough of the required product.
But the real world seldom works like this. Stronger government action is often needed to ensure harmonious markets, as the inquiry into our soaring petrol prices proved. More broadly, it has always been the role of government to balance competing interests, to forge compromises between, say, pedestrians and car drivers, between fishing firms and environmentalists. In New Zealand, government is all the more likely to harmonise interests if it embraces genuine power-sharing between Māori and Pākehā, another kind of balance. Government could also do far more to reduce economic imbalances, for instance through a guaranteed minimum income: a superior alternative to a universal basic income, it would provide stability and security to those who most need it. True balance needs fully functioning governments and communities, not just markets.
But again, these points only come into view if we take wellness seriously. As a recent Vanity Fair piece observed, the wellness industry, which had been “building to this very moment”, was perfectly poised to capture people’s attention during the lockdown. But we shouldn’t let that be the end of the story. Mindfulness, for instance, need not just be an individual way to combat stress. As the psychology professor Ronald Purser told Kim Hill earlier this year, “We can actually be creative, taking these practices and using them … collectively … to call into question our structural injustices, our political systems and build bonds of solidarity. I think we could find ways to create a more radical, civic, mindfulness that allows participants to still work on self-care, [so that] we're not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”
We could also apply these insights to one largely hidden truth about the coronavirus: its economic origin. A growing number of scientists believe that it is precisely our constant incursion into native rainforests – as we hunt out new economic opportunities – that brings us into contact with animal-origin infections like covid-19. Coronavirus is, in fact, a symbol of a world out of balance.
