Up: [[Compulsion]] Created: 2025-07-18 My local florist was delighted when I purchased all of the three-legged stools she had in the store. This was years ago, a few years before I folded under the relentless self-imposed pressure of sixteen hour work days. The stools were going to be the symbol of my salvation, mine and the various friends I gave them to as gifts. If you’re a perfectionist I’ll put money on you having had well-meaning family members, friends or coworkers tell you that you need more balance in your life. Maybe one of them shared the three-legged stool idea with you. It’s supposed to represent your day. You will be perfectly balanced if you devote eight hours to work, eight hours to play, and eight hours to sleep. I tried. I really did try. And I call hogwash! Even leaving aside the fact that life’s minutiae, including travelling to and from work, eats most of those eight non-work hours, my attempts to limit my work to eight hours made me miserable. “Immerse’ is one of my favourite words; if something really interests me, I want to be all-in. I decided that balance is both an illusion and boring, which I wrote about in [[Balance is Overrated]]. All of that said, there is one kind of balance that I think is worth going after. The idea of yin and yang, of balancing energy, has a lot of merit. Balance, in this case, would look like living at an energetic equilibrium where you’re neither underwhelmed nor overwhelmed. Perfectionists are always on the overwhelmed end of things and that’s okay sometimes, but maybe we also sometimes have times where we don’t take on more than we have the bandwidth to handle. How to decide when to immerse and when to back off? The trick is to know your values, what truly matters to you, and then to align your choices to those values, not to other people’s desires or expectations.