IELTS Essay Topic: The Work-life Balance

People aim to achieve the balance between their work and lives, but few people achieve it. What are the causes of the problem? How to overcome the problem?

Few people claim to be able to maintain the work-life harmony due to the competing pressures at work and demands at home. In this age of modern technology, one of the consequences of the imbalance is stress, a chronic problem common among working men and women alike. It is possible that the root of the problem is an undesirable and yet inevitable conflict between career ambition and personal as well as family life.

Some people have begun to think that working gets in the way of living, particularly when they are struggling for professional achievements. A reduction of official working hours does little to relieve the stress that affects one's life because of one's ambition for financial gains and social recognition. To illustrate, typical workaholics continue working at home, or telecommuting, in front of a computer screen. Since one hopes to stand out of the crowd, there is little time left for leisure, pleasure and spiritual development. This being the case, home is no longer a heavenly place for rest as it used to be. Accordingly, one may feel out of the work-life equilibrium in the presence of increasingly keen competition, as if from all directions.

More often than not, there is no clear line between work and family life, home becoming almost an extension of the workplace. Thus, the greater is the stress of trying to become successful, the less likely is the work-life balance, considering there is a price to be paid for taking pride in working, usually at the cost of a variety of family responsibilities and personal enjoyment. Of course, one can manage the work-life harmony skillfully to some extent, but not for long. In fact, this situation is so much like a teeter-totter, one end being work and the other being life. The metaphor refers to a rarely steady state, now moving from balance and now moving back towards it. That is why many people find it difficult to perform a balancing act between work and life.

The conflict of work and life may be the cause of the problem, but the solution must depend on one's attitude about money and time. Tackling the problem of the imbalance is nothing easy because the stress of work is invading home. To be realistic, it makes sense that people work because they need money to make ends meet at home, and that time for personal life must sometimes be limited only to uneasy sleep after a hard day. (about 365 words)

(Essay created by Jeenn Lee Hsieh, essay3663@hotmail.com )