Against the Cartesian Myth of Work/Life Balance: André Gregory's Letter

2 hours ago7 min read

It’s a story I’ve heard in a dozen different interviews, a quiet hum of discontent beneath the polished surface of modern professional life: the feeling of being cleaved in two. For half a millennium, since Descartes famously split the mind from the body, we’ve been grappling with the fallout of that philosophical schism.Now, we’ve engineered a new, personal fissure—the damaging divide between life and work. I was recently discussing this very tension with a seasoned theater director, and she pulled out an old, typewritten copy of a letter from André Gregory to Richard Avedon.It wasn’t a long manifesto, but its message was profound. Gregory wrote of rejecting the very premise of a separation, arguing that the concept of a 'workaholic,' a term so often worn as a perverse badge of honor, is built on a flawed foundation.It presupposes that work is something distinct from life, a separate axis that can be prioritized at the expense of living. This framing, inherited from the industrial model of labor that treated humans as cogs, asks us to live in parts.We are encouraged to partition ourselves: the 'worker' from nine to five, and the 'liver' in the scant hours remaining. But what does this fragmentation do to the human spirit? In my conversations with psychologists, they point to the rise in burnout and a pervasive sense of meaninglessness not merely from overwork, but from this internal dis-integration.The soul, they suggest, doesn't clock in and out. The artist doesn’t stop being an artist when they leave the studio; the teacher doesn’t cease being an educator when the final bell rings.Gregory’s letter, in its elegant simplicity, champions a more holistic view, one that echoes ancient philosophical traditions and the practices of artisans for whom craft and life were a seamless whole. He proposes that the goal isn't to balance two opposing forces, but to dissolve the artificial boundary altogether, to find a way of being where one’s labor is not an antagonist to one’s life but an expression of it.This isn’t a call to work more, but to work differently—to infuse our professions with purpose and our personal lives with the focus we bring to our tasks. It’s a radical, almost subversive idea in a culture that monetizes every hour and glorifies busyness.The consequence of ignoring this wisdom is a society of compartmentalized, exhausted individuals, forever trying to pour from an empty cup. The path forward, then, isn't a better planner or a more rigid schedule, but a fundamental re-imagining of what it means to live a full and integrated life, where the person who works and the person who lives are one and the same.

#lead focus news

#creativity

#work-life balance

#philosophy

#André Gregory

#Richard Avedon

#Cartesian dualism

#art

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