Personal vs Professional Life

Posted on | October 5, 2008 | No Comments

In the goal-no goal race that each of us is running today, we have our set priorities. Some of us spend most of our time at work place striving hard and harder to sustain the competition. The others have their private lives at priority. It is better for those involved in either of professional or a private life. But that would be an imaginary situation to talk about. Most if not all of us often get bogged down when dealing with professional and private lives simultaneously. It becomes the trickiest situation in life.

Many of us indeed get married to our professional lives and tend to neglect our private lives, especially people associated with the IT industry. Prolong working hours leaves them with no time for their private life. A friend of mine always replies ‘not bad’ whenever I ask him. ‘How are you?’ Why? – Because he doesn’t even have time for himself, not even to cook for himself – frozen paranthas are now part of his daily diet. Of course, it is his choice and preference in life.

There are others who place great emphasis on a happy private life. They can put anything on stake just to live a happy life. And, why not? After all, we earn to live a happy and prosperous life. Did I say ‘PROSPEROUS’?

God, this is a vicious circle! We start with an urge to live a happy life and then we plunge into our professional lives. All this just with an attitude of perfection, which we assume heads us to prosperity! And then, one fine day we realize that we have completely dilapidated personal lives. We are left with diminutive social circle and a countable number of friends because we were so engrossed in our profession that we lost touch.

Some times I wonder what should we choose of professional and personal lives? Should we prefer to be rather extremely successful professionally and have a tolerable yet unexciting private life, or have an extremely happy private life and only a tolerable and uninspiring professional life?

Since so many place great emphasis on a happy private life, why do we often wind up putting more energy into our professional lives? But when we feel our private life is more important to us, we realize our priorities really don’t support this. Are we simply unwilling to admit that work is more important? Do we then use work as a substitute? Do we hope professional success will somehow magically lead to personal happiness?

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