How to Balance Studies with Social Time?

Questioner: Namaste. My question, I think, is something that a lot of students face. So, like you said, the purpose of human life is to strive for excellence. But right now, I am trying my best to strive for that excellence, to become a very good engineer. But for this, of course, you need to dedicate a lot of personal time as well. But when you dedicate a lot of personal time towards this goal of excellence, you also lose out on a lot of social time. Like time for you to hang out with friends and have fun. So how would you ideally be able to balance it? Because until now everything I achieved my excellence in anything, it has always been by me shutting the door and just sitting all alone in my room or wherever and just working. So, that is not really sustainable if you want to have long-term friendships and all. So how would you suggest balancing all of this?

Acharya Prashant: No, that is a concept that these two are mutually exclusive things — studies and friendships. And that these two ought to be balanced. And that friendships cannot be sustained if one is too immersed in his studies. All this is a concept that you have absorbed from somewhere.

Why can’t you have friends who have fun with books? So, you are there and the friend is there and both of you are hanging out with books. How are these two things mutually exclusive, that it’s either books or friends?

Why can’t it be friends with books or books with friends? Why can’t you find friends in books? Why can’t you have friends who are books in themselves? You know even if you are not carrying books, that friend is a living, walking book. Why can’t you have friends of that nature?

The problem is internal fragmentation. One part of you wants to learn mathematics; one part of you wants to go into the bare and honest facts that science has to offer. And science is very honest. The other part of you wants to have friends who just entertain you with a lot of falseness and nonsense. And you do not realize that these two cannot go together.

The mind that wants to go into the reality of things via the scientific method. How can that same mind opt to have fun with someone who is cracking bad jokes that mean nothing and even expects you to laugh?

But we want to have these two and that we call as — work-life balance. Can we have both of these? Why do you want to have both of these? Have the one thing that is really really precious, no?

Do you want to have a flight and a train ticket and balance the two? One leg in the flight, one in the train. If you want to reach your destination, you need to have only one. And if you have two, then there is a problem. You will reach nowhere.

So have the right flight for the right destination and have your friend in the flight. If you have a friend who has a different flight to catch to a different destination, then you either drop the friend or the flight. These two cannot go together. Nothing of balance would work here. Drop this word ‘balance’ from your mind totally. Totally.

Balance simply means fragmentation and division. This is to be done, this is to be done, and I’m balancing both of these. Which, basically means that you can never be completely into either of these. Otherwise, why do you need to balance?

Joy lies in absolute immersion, not in balancing. Joy lies in totality, not in incompleteness; and all forms of balancing are incompleteness, are they not?

Fifty percent this, fifty percent that or ninety percent this, ninety percent that. Be it fifty or ninety, both are incomplete. Whereas joy lies in absolute hundred percent. If you cannot be dedicated hundred percent to the one thing in life, life, I repeat, is not worth living. Balance is not something good.

You know, where does this concept of balance come from? You want me to tell you? This comes from the point of the Industrial Revolution. Now Industrial Revolution threw up a lot of jobs that were inherently soul-sapping.

So, for example in a factory, you are just standing by an assembly line and inspecting goods as they pass by. And what’s your job eight hours a day? To keep looking at goods and if one of them is not proper then you pull it out. Right? Now, this kind of job is something no sane man can live with. It will kill you. Maybe you can do it for two days, four days, a month. But if you are told to do it for twenty years, how will you live?

So, the concept of work-life balance came in. They said, “Fine, you do this, we’ll pay you enough and then you go and have fun in the house.” So, there will be a work-life balance. And then you can console yourself. You can say, “Alright. I tortured myself for eight hours on the job but in return for that I got some money and using that money, I bought a vacation. And on vacation, I had fun. So see, there was a balance. There was torture and then there was fun and they were balanced.”

Don’t let this happen to you. Don’t live a balanced life, not at all. Live an outrageous life. Do you understand outrageous? Live a totally unbalanced life.

Unbalanced means? Only one side is present, the other side is totally absent. And that one side has to be so absolute that it contains all the sides. That one side is not partial then. That one side in itself is the absolute then.

Just get into the one thing worth loving in life. Choose the right road for yourself and if while walking down that road you meet great friends, no problem enlisting them.

But you cannot have friends who have chosen a different road. Especially when you are choosing a life partner. Please be very cautious. If there is one thing you love in life and you have a life partner whose ways are totally different, you’ll find yourself torn and split. Remember one leg in the flight, one leg in the train. That kind of life you will live for fifty years. Don’t let that happen.

Have one central theme in life and everything else should be around that theme. You cannot have two themes in life and balance them. Okay?

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