The Case Against Balance

Why Letting Yourself Care Deeply Will Make You Worse at Everything Else (And Why That’s Worth It)

Illustration by Mihajlo Stojanovic

This is Dispatch #15 in a series from the Human Aliveness Lab — raw, personal reflections exploring what it really means to feel alive. You can read the whole series here.

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Hi friends,

Most of us are taught from a young age that the ideal life is a balanced one. You know the drill: not too much, not too little. Everything in moderation. Eight hours of sleep, thirty minutes of movement, time for work, friends, family, hobbies, and “self-care.”

It sounds nice. But here’s what I’ve learned after years of trying to do it all: balance is wildly overrated — and honestly, kind of a myth.

The people I know or have studied who’ve actually created or mastered anything — whether it’s a sport, a craft, a business, or an art—are far from balanced. Not in a dysfunctional way (okay, sometimes a little), but in the sense that they let themselves fall deep into what matters most.

Balance rarely leads to mastery or meaning. It leads to… vanilla. You can dabble, or you can go all in. And “going all in” means being intense, letting yourself tip out of balance on purpose. It means being realistic about time: if you care deeplyabout something, you will have to let other things slide.

I see it in myself. The better I get at writing, jiu-jitsu, entrepreneurship, and putting my time into something meaningful, the more comically bad I get at other life activities. (Ask my friends or family: my adulting skills are… questionable at best.)

And it’s not just me — almost everyone I know or have read about who’s truly great at something is, frankly, spectacularly bad at something else. It’s almost a rule: the more world-class someone is at their craft, the more likely they are to have blind spots elsewhere. You know the type — a legendary musician who can’t boil an egg, the scientist who is late to everything, or an athlete who needs a teammate to update their phone.

It’s not a flaw; it’s the tradeoff.

So why do we cling to the myth of balance? Maybe because it feels safer. Balance gives us the comforting illusion that we can keep all our options open — that we’re not pigeonholing ourselves into any one identity or path.

But a life spent chasing balance is a life spent in the shallow end. If you want to care deeply — if you want to do anything that matters to you — you have to risk being unbalanced, in at least some areas of life.

(Ideally, you don’t let things get to the point of being too dysfunctional. The most devoted at their craft have family, friends, or hire help to pick up the slack. So, please don’t think I’m suggesting you be completely irresponsible or forget to pay your bills.)

Maybe, instead of seeking balance, we should be seeking meaningful imbalance. Choose what you’ll go deep on, and let the rest go — joyfully, even comically. That’s where real passion, and a real life, actually begin.

The alternative is trying to do everything — which mostly just leads to being mediocre and tired.

See you out there,

Krista

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