This is the third, and currently, planned final installment of the 4 bubbles of life series. You may find the first and second part linked in the words here somewhere.
We will start with the axioms we defined in the first post.
Reminder: there are 4 core aspects of a complete life: work, health, leisure and love. There is nothing more, nothing less. You may not have a complete life unless you hit all aforementioned aspects in a sufficient way in your life.
And the following formula:
One’s life is k hours/day/week complete if they have spent at least k hours every day for every one of the 4 mandatory aspects of life, averaged over the course of a week.
Let me give a simple example: Imagine you have spent at least 1 hour taking care of your health, 8 hours (per work day) working, 1 hour with your family and 1 hour relaxing on the couch, every day, every week, over the course of a few months, you have achieved a 1 hour/day/week complete life.
Well, hear me out on something.
What if we take the 1 hour relaxing on the couch and 1 hour spent with your family, and do them at the same time? We get 2 hours of relaxing with your family. What if you go out to walk, picnic on some healthy food and play in the park together (assuming kids), and you re-purpose that 1 hour of taking care of your health doing this instead. You have achieved 3 hours of health, leisure and love every day. And now, your k-life score went up from 1 to 3 hour/day/week complete.
You may think this is impractical, and you may be right. But I hope you got the right idea:
One who is able to merge his life goals effectively and efficiently will, in turn, achieve a more complete life.
Merging Work and Leisure: Influencers
You’ve probably just sighed quite strongly right now. This case study annoys me as much as it annoys you, but trust me, it’s going somewhere.
And there is a reason why you hate dislike them so much.
Their lives are more complete than yours.
If they are smart (and the most popular of them are), they have merged utterly and completely their work and leisure bubbles into a single, cohesive element: their life is their purpose. If they are even more clever, if they do not enjoy the process of:
- Filming
- Editting
- Scripting
They will offload it to someone else, and they will focus on the core aspect that they enjoy, be that:
- creative/informational writing
- education
- video games
- sports
- tech
- health
- comedy
- whatever other niche they love doing
And they earn money from this. If you ever went back home from a long day of work, just to play a few hours of your favourite game, you probably understand the frustration of learning of PewDiePie, JackSepticEye and others that do not go to work in the first place: they get to play all day long, if they want. Their purpose, again, is doing what they love.
Work and Leisure into one.
You can learn from this, but you don’t need to do what they do. Do something that you enjoy doing, earn money from it, and you will never work a single day in your life.
Merging Work and Health: Athletes
Here we have another two bubbles that can be connected, depending on the career of choice: sports.
Many sports require people to get into their peak physical performance, in order to compete against others that will try to achieve the same thing.
If you’ve ever went to a football match, or tennis, or basketball, you know: you, or your friends, find it entertaining. It’s a leisure activity for them, to watch feats of athletic and strategic prowess.
But there is a danger lurking in this field: going too far.
There’s many-a-times you heard of professional fighters, or power lifters, or any other sport where “health” is taken too far, and it is no longer hitting that bubble. They overexert themselves, to get one extra rep, extra kilo, extra kilometer, maybe some performance enhancing (for fields which still allow, like body building).
There is a point reaching athletic performances no longer takes care of your health, and it should not be considered a merge anymore.
So thread carefully…
Merging Work and Love
I hate the saying “never shit where you eat”. It’s like today’s day and age truly does not want you to be happy, and people collectively don’t want you to be happy either.
I find nothing more beautiful than to share your purpose with the one you love. I have been a little inspired, on this matter, by the movie Transcendence. I could make a review if you’re interested, but the main gist was this: they worked together, and when they died, they managed to save their consciousnesses in a little haven, where they could spend eternity together.
Anyway, back on track.
If you have a partner, or kids, you likely are going through the pain of not seeing them for the vast majority of your every day (or week), because you need to commute, then work, then commute back. At the very least. Then, you are tired, and the time you spend together is limited to few activities, and unfortunately, some of those activities may even be chores (not leisure).
Wouldn’t it be so much more rewarding to have been, for the vast majority of your day, side by side with your partner, eating together, helping each other on stressful tasks, and achieve something together every now and then, giving you energy and happiness, and reasons to celebrate?
Of course, there are downsides. You can both be very stressed, and work-related discussions can get more heated than they would with a random co-worker, but at the same time, work stress can reach home anyway. And instead of having the whole day to resolve stressful situations, in the context of both of you having complete knowledge of the circumstance you both are in, you may take your stress out on your partner anyway, without understanding what the other is going through.
So there are downsides. But those downsides exist anyway, and overall, working together can turn into a life together.
Which leads me to the following case study:
Can you have it all?
I believe the answer is yes. And this is the proof:
https://www.youtube.com/@BreatheAndFlow
I hope it’s legal do put this screenshot here, since I did not contact them in any way. Anyway, I do this for you, so you can get annoyed at people living the perfect life.
For people not aware of who they are, their names are Brie and Flo (I still love the pun in the name of their channel), and they post videos with guided yoga and meditation sessions, where one of them (or both) performs the movements. They sometimes vlog about their lives, they post on instagram, and maybe more stuff, I don’t know.
They (mostly Flo actually) are who got me to understand what yoga really is, and I would not have been a daily practitioner if not for their channel.
Literally every hour of every day, their life is their work. And every hour of every day, they do things that benefit their health, because it benefits their channel.
And they have kids, and they do yoga while their kids play around them and try to follow their movements.
And from what I hear, they live in an RV and AirBnbs, so they travel around the world to record from different locations.
Unless you can work remotely, you only travel abroad on holidays. They do everything for a living.
And they do everything together.
If this is not a 16 hour/day/week-complete life, I do not know what is.
Final thoughts: What can you do?
I hope reading this has been more inspiring than it was depressing. Your work may already be your happy place, or you may already do “healthy physical activity” with your partner, but if you find that you struggle to find time to fit everything in, you are not alone.
But you can do it all. It’s not easy, and it may be dangerous and scary.
But it is possible. And at the earliest opportunity, you should do it.
But how? I’m still working things out myself, so I’m not the best person to give specific advice on it.
So let’s think together. Think of the intuition, think of the reason why you need to do this. And at the end of the day, it all boils down to how you multi-task your life bubbles.
Not by doing more things at the same time, but by achieving more with every single thing you do.
I think I know a lot about many things 
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