The various exercises and starting points described above can be applied generally to one’s life but also specifically to different aspects of life. These are suggestions for how the dimensions of balance can be used to support action in different areas of one’s life. The most important assumption is that these different spheres must become part of one’s civic struggle in order for their potential to be realized. Spheres such as work, relationships, and parenting that are inward, focused will never be as good as they could be because a part of us, the part connected to all of humanity, is forgotten. Below are suggestions on how the dimensions of balance can be used to support thinking about lifelong learning as a way to summarize the various dimensions of balance and their relationships, along with some examples of how sociological insights from different dimensions of balance can be applied to a specific area
Learning for Life: A Summary of Different Dimensions of Balance
There is a life of intense learning in various forms through personal experiences, culture, reading, and problem, solving. Here are some guidelines:
Citizenship, care, and heroism, center the civic struggle in your life across various spheres. Learn so that you can help others and take control of your life in the political sphere. Learn with a purpose that extends beyond yourself.
Virtue, based learning, learning is often viewed through a psychological lens. A virtue, based approach to learning emphasizes that learning as a practice is central to many virtues and is necessary for striving toward a more moral life, since we are not born morally perfect.
Adventureify and gamify, turn learning into an adventure by gamifying it and linking it to grand, epic goals. Design learning to be as close as possible to a good game.
Community, learn together with others, through interaction with others, and for the sake of others.
Autonomy, learn to become freer. With competence, knowledge, and ability comes power.
Objectify, use yourself as a tool to expand your subjectivity through the various worlds you can explore through learning.
Specialized Systematics, alternate between specialization and systematics. Strive for curiosity and personal development.
Focus, learning requires deep focus that opens the door to flow experiences where our mental energy can be concentrated.
Genuine role, playing, build an identity as a reader, writer, intellectual, and citizen, while simultaneously cultivating yourself as a way to embrace otherness so that your sense of self can grow.
Slow speed and temporal citizenship, find your rhythm and build momentum. Accumulate the benefits of positive experiences linked to learning.
Safe risk-taking, expand your world by taking the risk of being wrong in order to build a more secure foundation of understanding the world.
Emotional reflexivity and rational enchantment, cultivate curiosity, wonder, boundary experiences (Thurfjell, 2020), and profound experiences (Thurfjell, 2020) through learning. A caring curiosity directed toward the world. Driven by the desire for meaning, which creates excitement in contrast to boredom, the companion of meaninglessness. Strive to be an “energy star” (Collins & McConnell, 2015) who feels strong vitality and momentum.
Reflexive action, initiate a process of becoming more conscious (Friere, 2000) in which action and reflection support one another through experimentation and testing.
Eudaimonic hedonism, learn both through pleasure as a driving force and as a duty with a purpose beyond yourself (Yeager et al., 2013).
Critical optimism and realistic idealism: embrace adulthood; change through knowledge is possible; truly utopian thinking points to possibilities of what could be.
Simplexity, create practices that simplify learning: challenge yourself, create desirable difficulties, maintain deep focus, ask questions, etc.
Relationships
Relationships, whether friendly or romantic, will result from the various balances and imbalances that both parties find themselves in. Imbalances that both partners have can be amplified; imbalances that one partner has can affect the entire relationship. Inevitably, we bring different imbalances into a relationship because the pursuit of the good life is so complex and insidious. How can the relationship become a place where these imbalances can be reduced? How can the relationship become a place where greater balance is achieved?
Find people with whom you feel at home, people who are passionate about ideas similar to yours. Build strength in your relationships. If we’re with people who aren’t passionate about the same ideas as we are, we’ve created a weakness in the relationship. You become dependent on creating strong connections in other ways. Often, these ideas are naturally expressed through similar senses of humor, similar worldviews, similar interests, and so on.
Find each other in the civic struggle and in citizenship itself. Many relationships become hollow when they are merely “purified relationships,” as Anthony Giddens calls them, that is, relationships based solely on the feelings we evoke in one another, without any deeper commitment. Without the civic struggle, the relationship also becomes more boring, since we’ve shrunk our world to the private sphere and entertainment. There aren’t many challenges there, so challenges need to be created artificially. This is where small things can become disproportionately large. If the civic struggle has withered away, the private struggle will dominate with its trivialities and meaninglessness. The lack of a strong sense of purpose, of living a life for others beyond oneself and one’s relationship, will seep into the relationship. The only outlet becomes supporting each other in “exciting” and “challenging” careers, where the goal is still one’s own privatized self, actualization through work. Another outlet is having children, but this will lead to more problems because the children will react to your privatized relationship lacking a greater purpose. The struggle for civic engagement allows you to become a team. Shouldn’t you be with someone who shares your ideological convictions, then? It’s possible to have different convictions, but if one’s ideological conviction is that one can ignore the struggle for civic engagement, this will cause problems for the relationship.
Support each other in embracing simplicity. Be there for each other as you build habits and routines that can bring adventure into your lives. Read, learn, and experience things together.
The sense of adventure in a relationship, as portrayed in movies, often comes from the couple coming together as a byproduct of a larger adventure. People come together in the struggle of the exciting experiences they share. This can be difficult to create when you’re together, but the more diverse interests you have, which open up the world and make it rich with things to discover, the easier it becomes. Then the encounter becomes one where you realize there’s another adventurer here, another wanderer who experiments and discovers the world instead of just being a tourist.
Safe risk-taking. Thomas Scheff argues that relationships need a good balance between closeness and distance. Too much closeness creates dependence; too much distance creates coldness. The relationship needs to be supported by taking the risk of being hurt after opening up about one’s thoughts and feelings. Security is built through this risk-taking. The more security both people have within themselves beforehand, the greater the security in the relationship becomes. There is a great deal of insecure risk-taking and secure risk aversion in relationships. Often in friendships, there can be a desire to take insecure risks mixed with a high degree of cliché and narcissism, such as experimenting with drugs or engaging in various risky behaviors that do not benefit society but rather harm it in various ways.
Meaning through rational enchantment. Relationships always contain an element of irrationality; as Nietzsche put it, there is always madness in love. But there is another form of irrationality that becomes a problem: an excessive belief in a romanticized view of relationships that leads one to underestimate the importance of viewing love as an action and a choice. The openness of the world we live in, where one can leave a relationship at any time, means we’re faced with decisions about when to stay and when to leave. Is there rationality in the relationship? Are you aligned in your shared ideas and ways of being, willing to work on learning about each other and life, and are the experiences mostly positive? The loss of magic, in the form of boredom, is a recurring feeling in modern relationships. Historically, this can be linked to the fact that we’ve never spent as much time with our partners as we do today. Before, women and men often worked separately, and people had children at a young age. Today, many couples spend a long time living apart, with more free time and social norms that expect them to spend a lot of time together. To prevent this from becoming boring and filled with petty problems that erode the relationship with trivialities, both partners need the adventures they have on their own and the ability to merge them into a shared adventure. If the relationship isn’t rationally enchanted, it eventually becomes irrationally enchanted as a defense mechanism. For example, through the commodification of the relationship, were certain purchases are made for the other person. They consume expensive and complex experiences together, such as dining at high, end restaurants where both have convinced themselves they’re “foodies.”
The relationship needs a balance between hedonism and eudaimonism. The vast majority of relationships are hedonistic; people get together to enjoy each other’s company. This imbalance pays off in that it is a recipe for boredom. The relationship needs eudaimonism, doing something good together. This nourishes the relationship, ensuring it benefits others and isn’t just about narcissistic pleasure. The presence of eudaimonia in the relationship also allows us to challenge the cultural narcissism that most people bring into relationships. By directing our gaze outward toward the world instead of staring blankly at each other, there is an opportunity for new energy to enter the relationship. The simple hedonism suggested here consists of experiences in nature, social interactions, learning together, and civic engagement for others.
The relationship will need critical optimism. The demands of becoming an adult, and the things we can’t handle, may be what causes the relationship to end. It’s about being idealistic about what a relationship can be while simultaneously making concrete progress toward it with realistic steps. Setting expectations that are too high for one another will lead to resentment. Setting them too low will as well. Maturity means taking responsibility, being patient, and not becoming cynical.
If playfulness disappears from a relationship, what remains is a seriousness that easily leads to rigidity and conflict. It will be important to cultivate playfulness through humor and creative shared experiences. How do you play? The key lies in conversations, shared interests, and sex can also be included here. However, playfulness can become limited if it is purely hedonistic. The “eudaimonic play,” as Deterding (2014) has called it, is necessary for the relationship. Play that leads to learning and value for other people outside the relationship will be important.
The past as a resource, strong mindful presence and attention in the present, with the future as a guide. What resources do you bring with you from the past, and what have you learned about your weaknesses? Are you stuck in the past, in what once was, in what you had? Have you become stuck in a life marked by regret and a sense of failure, always glancing backward with a high risk of stumbling over the same mistakes again, as Seneca put it? Attention to the present can be attempted to be created artificially by consciously trying to be in the moment. But if the present in the relationship is dull, this can be difficult. Our focus on the present needs to be anchored there through engaging activities. These activities need to be imbued with meaning regarding the future of your relationship and the wider community.
Relationships are brought to a head by the inescapable ambiguity of encountering one another as subject and object. In relationships, Martin Buber’s quote takes on concrete meaning: “The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings.” We need one another and can easily become objects to one another, mere objects. Where we expect to get things from the other, and the other is expected to do things for us. This instrumentalization through expectations and demands placed on the other can go so far that the person standing before us, the subject with their own subjectivity, disappears. In relationships built on expectations of certain actions, the relationship can become a play with various rehearsed actions and lines. We need to be objects for one another, but above all for the outside world. The balance in objectification lies in being able to be subjects for one another and be accepted as such, while at the same time serving together as tools for society and helping others around us.
The body is central to relationships. Many problems arise in relationships as a result of the body being out of balance. Cultural disconnection manifests in not getting enough physical activity, eating poorly, sleeping too little, or spending too little time in nature. The energy we have for one another disappears with this cultural disconnection. A relationship can also suffer from or “biologization,” where partners confine each other to how they “should” be based on assumptions about how our genders influence us and how we should act accordingly. Engage in physical activities together. The body needs adventure, discover it together, and experience new and exciting things as a couple.
Relationships are a space where you need to be able to reflect together and translate that reflection into action. Relationship skills, such as emotional reflexivity, are central to managing all the strong emotions tied to the relationship. As with other complex matters, relationships require us to learn about them in order to improve.
How can you become “energy stars” together? Many people have low expectations of what they can get out of a healthy relationship. Relationships that give us a lot of energy can turn us into energy stars. To achieve this, we need to energize each other through strong interaction rituals. You can find these in civic engagement. It’s difficult to find them in each other’s careers because you have different interests. Drawing energy from each other’s specific nerdy interests will also be a weak foundation for energy, since these are unique to each of you. If you share the same interests, you can draw energy from them if you use them to learn something new. Many people may have shared interests, but they pursue those interests just to have a little fun without actually improving. If you take on the civic struggle together, you can find security, curiosity, challenge, and the joy of striving together.
A healthy relationship requires genuine pretending. Being completely authentic in a relationship is held up as an ideal. A place where we can be our true selves and be accepted for it. However, this makes it difficult to build humility into the relationship, since the starting point is that you’re supposed to accept and love each other 100%. This also creates a crutch and a foundation for a false sense of self within a relationship, the belief that you’re a better person than you actually are. The fact that everyone has access to a person who thinks they’re the best thing that’s ever happened to them will fuel narcissism and hinder the humility required to realize that one is a small part of all the problems in the world when one isn’t part of the solution. The criticism that may arise in a relationship is, in principle, always linked to personal struggles. There are never arguments in relationships because the other person isn’t a good enough citizen. These are actually the kinds of arguments that should be present in everyone’s relationships, because that’s the crucial detail that’s missing from them. This criticism is never taken to heart because, in most relationships, people have accepted the other person’s shallow, privatized sense of citizenship, since they’re often the same way themselves. The relationship becomes yet another space for indifference and resignation in the face of the world in which one finds oneself.