A popular sentiment among some online circles these days is that the pursuit of balance is blasé.

I wrote about this a while ago. At that point, delicacy seemed the best way to go.

Yeah, sure, I thought, an interesting idea.

But would you know, it’s taken off?

I’m so done with the balance bashing.

In fact, I’m about to drop the F bomb. Repeatedly.

Recently I’ve  been reading laments over the human body’s failure thus far to evolve beyond needing sleep. (Seriously!) Without that pesky time waster, the thinking goes, we could be doing so much more work.

Because who needs a sense of self outside of wage earning activities? Who needs a social life? That’s for losers who obviously aren’t as dedicated or passionate about their work as The Rest of Us.

Apparently the desire for time away from work, interests in other pursuits and due time and attention to bodily needs is not compatible with success in business.

Nope, the thinking goes, seeking balance is lame, and moot, and irreconcilable with the pursuit of work that you love; work that burns in the pit of your passionate belly.

Fuck balance, or so the sentiment goes.

<Ahem> No, seriously, AHEM!

No one ever said that starting or running a business would be easy.

It’s a lot of work. A hell of a lot of work, in fact.

Some folks are totally capable of condensing that work into a focused, frenzied bubble that excludes everything else. Especially if there’s an opportunity afterwards to completely, totally unplug and fully recharge, leaving it all behind and escaping completely. Work hard, play hard, right?

But for me and my clients, a binary life is not an option.

Look, there’s a central question here that has everything to do with the dividing line, a boundary, between where your work stops and where you begin. That line exists when you close your laptop and decide to stop taking calls at a certain time everyday.  It exists when you decide that maintaining your friendships and physical wellbeing is important enough to coexist along with personal investments in business.

That boundary – porous and permeable though it may be – is necessary. That boundary is made up of self-care, and deciding that self-care is important is a vote for balance. No matter how much we love what we do.

So if checking out completely for however long it takes to recuperate from alienation from self and nourishment isn’t an option for many of us, then clearly erasing that boundary between self and work is NOT A GOOD IDEA.

Why?

Because it’s not fucking sustainable.

And because no matter how much you love your clients, the product you’re developing, or the service you’re about to launch, when you sacrifice everything that keeps you whole in order to give it life, eventually you will burn the hell out. You will resent it.

And does that mean that you just didn’t love your work enough?

Hell, no.

Does that mean that you just weren’t willing to give what it takes (or what some folks believe it takes) to succeed?

Hell, no.

Isn’t this the same logic that motivated so many of us to opt out of the traditional workforce in the first place to pursue something more… us? Something that reflected who we are?

Most of the fabulous, creative entrepreneurs I know decided to follow their hearts with their work in respectful homage of a sense of self.

And now that’s the work to which we offer ourselves up in sacrifice on the alter of productivity?

For fuck’s sake.

I’m convinced that work and not-work exist, as most things do, along a spectrum. At one end is work that you don’t give a shit about, a black hole of time and energy that isn’t meaningful in the long run, and you do it because you have to in order to survive.

That’s one extreme.

At the other extreme (which comes perilously close to full circle) time, energy, social life, and sense of self outside of income-generating activities collectively take a back seat to… work. Sound familiar?

I’d wager balance is even more important if we love what we do, because only then do we sustainably have anything to give to it; only then do we have the resources to embody that work and purpose. And when we love what we do, having those things to offer matters profoundly.

You cannot source and source and source your energy and creativity without stopping to refill the nutritious soil from which new ideas poke their tender little sprout heads.

It is not possible. The world is full of limited and finite resources, and we creative entrepreneurs are not exempt from this truth.  Oil, water, Social Security, youth, endangered species, ancient hardwood forests, coal, ozone, and YOU, homeslice.

When they’re gone, they’re gone. No matter how much of ourselves we invest in our business or how closely our business is tailored to our unique gifts and passions, we are not unconditionally, effortlessly renewable.