My wife has an odd quirk, she sets all our clocks to military time. I have no idea why. Last week our daughter got frustrated trying to figure out what time it was when I was driving her home from camp. Like her dad, she doesn’t like to be told how things work, she’d rather figure them out herself. I couldn’t just tell a stubborn 7-year-old to subtract 12 from whatever time it says on the clock.
She also has a lot of opinions. The other day she told me, “Daddy you’re a hard worker.” Of course she said that. It’s all she ever sees me do. While she meant it as a compliment, I heard it as a failure to set boundaries between my work and our lives.
Work life balance is bullshit. It’s a tired phrase intended to let us believe that it’s possible to be both an accomplished professional and a person thriving with interests and experiences outside of work. It’s easy to forget that sometimes it’s impossible to separate the working day from the living day. How do you know when it’s ok to wait until tomorrow to respond to that email? Or that you can skip creating that one pointless slide and have dinner instead?
Before 2020, work had edges. You left a building. You sat in traffic or on a train, and whatever that commute was, it did one useful thing, it forced your mind to acknowledge that the work day was behind you. These days, nothing marks the handoff anymore unless you build the marker yourself.
Many of us, me included, no longer “work from home”, we “live at work.” That’s a problem without an easy solution. To help, I’m creating a brand to nurture a moment of separation between the high tension of the work day and the low tension of the rest day. Believe it or not, the anchor to that moment is soap.
It’s a soap with a timestamp that says, this is the moment your body has been waiting for all day. Too much to ask for a bar of soap? I don’t think so.
This is the foundation of the brand I’m building, one soap and one heavy-trace mistake at a time. Not skincare claims. Not a beauty bar. A moment bar. Something with enough weight and ritual to it, the cacao 3-ways, the six-week cure, the clean ingredients, that using it becomes a moment you own. A moment that doesn’t own you.
My moment is putting my daughter to bed. In a prior post I wrote about the promise I make to her every night, that I’ll see her in the morning. What I didn’t realize is that I also make a promise to myself, your work for the day is done. When I leave her room, the clock reads 21:00. That’s my timestamp. That’s my moment. What’s yours?
Disclosure: I write these posts. AI helps me edit them.