We're told to balance work and life. When did rest become one more task to complete?
Simon Mullan's studio holds work from actual building sites: overalls, tiles, stolen cable, cut into material and hung on the wall. During a Mae Symposium in his Berlin studio, that same refusal to separate work from identity opened into a wider question: is work-life balance even the right thing to be asking for?
We tend to talk about work and life as two separate rooms. One is where we perform, produce, meet deadlines. The other is where we actually live. Balance, in this picture, means moving carefully between the two, and taking care that one doesn't swallow the other.
But what if that picture is wrong from the start? What if the need to even ask the question is already telling us something?
There is the work we do, and there is the life we do it inside of. We tend to assume the two are in competition, that time given to one is time taken from the other.
Until one of them wins.
But what if they were never actually separate? Treating work as something outside of life, something to be defended against or escaped from, already assumes a kind of distance from ourselves, as if the hours spent working couldn't really belong to us. What if work, even in its least glamorous forms, was never meant to be separate from who we are, but one of the ways we express it?
This question sits quietly inside the way Berlin-based artist Simon Mullan describes his own life.
He learned to lay tiles on actual building sites, and years later those tiles became part of his artwork. He learned to wire buildings, and a copper plate in his studio now holds stolen cable, kept as material, building-site humour turned into an object. Three hundred work overalls hang in the space, technically the same uniform, technically the same blue, except each one carries a different history in its stains. Beside them: videos from the party and subculture scenes he also documents, not as a break from the more serious work, but as the same kind of evidence.
He doesn't describe any of it as separate roles.
"I am an artist... it happens so that this morning I worked as an electrician."
Five people sat with him in that studio, and what interested the room was that this refusal to divide a life into "work" and everything else didn't stay confined to Simon's own case. It became a question everyone in the circle had to answer for themselves.
When the question is already the symptom
For Amir, an engineer, the divide never made much sense to begin with.
He doesn't think in terms of work and life as two separate things to weigh against each other. For him there is only life, made of different elements, and work happens to be one of them.
He thinks of his job as a medium for his own creativity. An opportunity, not an obligation.
If an idea arrives on a Saturday morning, he doesn't see a reason to deny himself the pleasure of working on it.
The whole idea of work-life balance, he says, is already a symptom.
Needing to ask the question, needing to protect one side from the other, already means treating work as something not quite pleasant, something to be defended against.
He does draw one line. Paperwork, the part of the job he never chose, stays at the office. Even for himself, even outside working hours, he won't do it anywhere else.
Not everything converges. But most of it does, and he built his own boundary only around the part that didn't.
For Lea, the same refusal came from somewhere else entirely.
Enjoying the work was never the problem
For Lea, a full-time artist, it wasn't really about defining work differently. It was that she never felt the pressure everyone else seemed to be describing.
She doesn't relate to the idea of needing to relax, of needing permission to stop.
Even before she was an artist, in the corporate jobs she had earlier in her life, work could still feel like genuine time well spent. What decided it was never the job title. It was whether she could see a sense in what she was doing.
When she could see that sense, the work was already part of the life she wanted. Not a debt she owed to it.
She isn't describing an exception to the rule of hard work. She is describing what happens when the rule itself, the need for balance, never had anything to apply to.
For Jernej, the same conclusion arrived through a very different door.
No ideal to reach, just a rhythm
For Jernej, a product designer, there is no fusion story to tell. He works from everywhere: cafes, bars, sometimes an iPad on the counter at midnight. By his own account, he has no work-life balance.
But he doesn't say this as a complaint.
He has learned to use the blurred boundary of contemporary life to his own advantage. A crowded, messy bar relaxes him in a way a clean office never would. Moving location resets something. Working like this, with no fixed schedule, he has come to know his own rhythm: when to keep going, and when the familiar signs mean it's time to stop.
Keys slipping from his hands. A pattern he now recognises before it becomes a problem.
When he sees it, he takes a couple of months off. Then he comes back.
"The problem with work-life balance," he said, "is that if you cannot achieve it, it's kind of another layer of frustration."
If work and life are two separate things to be weighed against each other, the break stops being rest. It becomes a task with its own standard to meet, one more thing you can get wrong. Fail to switch off properly, fail to relax the right amount, and the guilt doesn't stay on the work side. It follows you into the pause too.
What Jernej describes instead sounds closer to what Amir was already pointing at: a life made of different elements, work, rest, going out, with no fixed order between them. Nothing to balance because nothing is ranked above anything else. Just a rhythm to notice, and a body that says when.
Not everyone gets there the same way
Not everyone in the room described it this way.
For Mareike, the boundary that Simon, Amir and Lea seemed to access naturally had to be built by hand. A former teacher, she now works the street in whiteface, dressed into a role she once wore as a teenager. Putting it on is itself a kind of labour, one that only ends once an adrenaline peak arrives. Where the others found a boundary unnecessary, she needed one badly enough to invent it herself, out of costume rather than time.
For Lena, the fusion Simon described from the artist's side looked different from where she stood. She works as a designer inside another artist's studio, and the ideas she shapes there don't carry her name. "What my work is," she said, "is also somebody else's work." The same convergence that reads as identity for Simon reads as a weird dynamic for her, a boundary she didn't choose, drawn by whoever the work belongs to.
Their answers didn't fit the same shape as the others. Maybe that's the point. If work and life really can converge into one thing, it doesn't happen the same way for everyone, or on the same terms.
What replaces balance, once it's gone?
We started with Simon Mullan's refusal to divide his life into work and everything else: the tiles, the wiring, the studio, the parties, all converging into one identity he simply calls artist.
During the conversation, that same refusal took a different shape each time.
For Amir, it meant treating work as one element among many, with no hierarchy over rest or anything else, except for the one part he never chose, which stayed exactly where he put it.
For Lea, it meant discovering that the divide had never applied to her at all, as long as she could see the sense in what she was doing.
For Jernej, it meant something closer to self-knowledge: no ideal to fail, just a rhythm, and a body that tells him when to stop before he has to.
For Mareike and Lena, it meant something harder won, or not fully theirs to have.
None of them arrived at the same version of it.
What interested us more was that each of them had already replaced "balance" as an idea with something that actually worked for their own life. Not a schedule to keep, not a ratio to protect. Something closer to a flow between elements that don't need ranking: work beside rest, beside meaning, beside whatever else a life is made of, moved through rather than managed.
Amir replaced it with meaning, applied case by case.
Lea replaced it with sense, which made the question of balance beside the point.
Jernej replaced it with observation, watching his own signals instead of measuring himself against an ideal that turned even his breaks into one more task to get right.
Maybe balance was never the right word for what any of them were actually doing. It assumes two sides, in competition, needing to be kept in check, and a break that only counts if it's done correctly. What Simon, Amir, Lea and Jernej describe instead is closer to a single life, unevenly shaped, where work is one part among several and nothing demands to be defended against anything else.
Not everyone gets to experience it this way. Some of that depends on what the work is, who owns it, whether there's room to shape it around a life instead of the other way around.
But placed next to each other, these versions suggest something simpler than a solution: that the exhaustion so many people describe as a failure to balance might actually be a failure of the word itself, asked to describe several different situations as if they were one, and to turn rest into something we can fail at too.
Maybe there is no ideal ratio to protect.
Maybe there is only the question each of them was already answering: what does this particular life need right now, and who gets to decide that.
This article developed from a Mae Symposium held with Simon Mullan in his Berlin studio, facilitated by Mattia Marino, Mae's co-founder. The reflections emerged through the experiences shared in the room, using Simon's artistic practice as their starting point.
