The high price of low work-family balance

Watching movies alone in a cinema, eating hotpot by yourself in a restaurant, drinking coffee in solitude at a café, going to a hospital without any company ... These are selected by Chinese netizens among the "10 levels of loneliness of being single." However, many people whose partners work in the tech industry have similarly lonely lives even though they are not single.

As a wife of someone working at an Internet company, I am very familiar with the grueling culture of overtime work and the adverse effect it can have on families, which is often overlooked by society.

My husband starts work most days at 9am and generally finishes at 9pm but sometimes is still working at midnight. I often sarcastically call him "my roommate" who comes back to our "dormitory" to sleep at night and goes to work in the morning.

Shortly after we got married, I couldn't stand the lonely, boring periods of time after I finished work. Instead of watching television alone at home, I went to the gym to work out and took a calligraphy class to kill time.

However, things got even worse after we became new parents. In the first few months after having our baby, my husband and I sometimes felt tension in our relationship. Part of the reason was that he had little time to spend with our daughter. Moreover, his stress at work also affected our family life.

To my relief, he tried hard to balance work and family, getting up earlier to play with our child, establishing boundaries between work and family, improving work efficiency and squeezing time to exercise during his lunch break to defuse the emotional intensity of the stressful situation.

However, not everyone is willing to make changes. One of my husband's colleagues is a workaholic who would rather sacrifice his personal life to get ahead professionally. He lives in Shanghai while his wife works at another e-commerce giant in neighboring city of Hangzhou. The two have very little time to spend with their son, who is looked after by his grandparents in their hometown. Three people in three different places is definitely not an ideal family environment.

With endless to-do lists and a flood of tasks to deal with, many female employees in the tech industry are single simply because they are too busy to make new friends and fall in love. What's more, these women are highly educated and accomplished, which many men may consider too "high maintenance."

I hope rapid technological development doesn't come at the expense of individual happiness. For people working in the tech industry or haunted by overtime culture, I want to say there is nothing more important in life than your family, so please spend more time with them.