Not so much “buying my way out of conflict”, but still “using money to reduce feelings of burnout”:
In my experience, people who are overworked tend to go to extremes. They’ll eat too much or skip meals; they’ll sleep until noon or stay up all night; they’ll spend money impulsively or practice frugality to the point of deprivation.
I have a balance of self-indulgent and self-sacrificing tendencies, but I’ve substantially reduced the burden of the former by reframing my “indulgences” to “treating myself nicely”.
In this new outlook, I’m not “wasting money on fast food”; I’m “buying myself a nice meal to pay myself back for a long night of work”. I’m not “drinking too much caffeine to force myself awake”, I’m “gifting myself a soda to help me face the work with good cheer”.
I can imagine this being dangerous (it’s a cliche that people addicted to alcohol find reasons to “deserve” another drink), but it’s worked well for me; instead of feeling bad about two things (my work *and* my indulgence), I now feel bad about half of a thing (my work, tempered by self-care).
I also tried this strategy as a tutor and found that it worked well. Students who were used to being pressured by their parents were surprised when I told them to treat themselves well the night before and the day after an SAT: “Tell your parents that Aaron said you deserve a break” was an effective tool for stress reduction.
My heuristic here is to check to see if I need to do the activity (maybe it’s something I’ve just incorrectly thought I had to do because of some incorrect, unexamined assumption) and if I want to do the activity. If I’m not excited about doing it then I check to see how much it would cost me to get someone else to do it, and if it costs less than some number at which I value the time during which I would have to do the task, I pay for it instead, otherwise I become happy to do it because I generate value with the time over what I would have had otherwise.
How have you bought your way out of work-life conflict?
Examples:
More expensive housing closer to work.
Uber/lyft
Takeout instead of cooking.
Housecleaning service.
Hiring someone to watch my kid instead of trying to work during naps and in the evenings.
Not so much “buying my way out of conflict”, but still “using money to reduce feelings of burnout”:
In my experience, people who are overworked tend to go to extremes. They’ll eat too much or skip meals; they’ll sleep until noon or stay up all night; they’ll spend money impulsively or practice frugality to the point of deprivation.
I have a balance of self-indulgent and self-sacrificing tendencies, but I’ve substantially reduced the burden of the former by reframing my “indulgences” to “treating myself nicely”.
In this new outlook, I’m not “wasting money on fast food”; I’m “buying myself a nice meal to pay myself back for a long night of work”. I’m not “drinking too much caffeine to force myself awake”, I’m “gifting myself a soda to help me face the work with good cheer”.
I can imagine this being dangerous (it’s a cliche that people addicted to alcohol find reasons to “deserve” another drink), but it’s worked well for me; instead of feeling bad about two things (my work *and* my indulgence), I now feel bad about half of a thing (my work, tempered by self-care).
I also tried this strategy as a tutor and found that it worked well. Students who were used to being pressured by their parents were surprised when I told them to treat themselves well the night before and the day after an SAT: “Tell your parents that Aaron said you deserve a break” was an effective tool for stress reduction.
My heuristic here is to check to see if I need to do the activity (maybe it’s something I’ve just incorrectly thought I had to do because of some incorrect, unexamined assumption) and if I want to do the activity. If I’m not excited about doing it then I check to see how much it would cost me to get someone else to do it, and if it costs less than some number at which I value the time during which I would have to do the task, I pay for it instead, otherwise I become happy to do it because I generate value with the time over what I would have had otherwise.