@Munish I’ve always experienced 'the world' as encouraging and critical, diverse and outspoken. There has been no end of people telling me what’s what, what it means, and why it matters.

I think, since that pandemic, it has proven difficult for many to keep their informational constructs intact, and that folks have all sorts of reactions to this—from industrial strength denial that there are any bubbles in the first place, to non-committal self-congratulatory guilt pimping, and everything else in-between. That’s where most of us are too, in the Great Between great between.

I have to stop capitalizing things for no reason other than cheap effect. There is some site hawking life/work balance with exactly that name, so I de-capitalized and emphasized instead.

I guess I must now also add that the reason I want to be clear about my non-affiliation with a site selling "life/work balance" is that the concept is empty, despite sounding quite reasonable. Really, are life and work these two distinct things that are naturally out of balance? And each of us is left to resolve that conundrum on our own? Of course not—work is part of life, not the other way around.