There’s a melancholy bubbling up across my networks.

A murmuring that as a tech culture we’ve lost the ability to compartmentalize our work and personal lives.

That the ability to put things in separate buckets is somewhat akin to personal happiness and work productivity.

Maybe this is coming from the yearly slide towards winter and ennui that comes with the holiday season.

Or that the startup world has hit a wall of stress, with fundraising at a seasonal slowdown and the realities of an increasingly challenging market taking their toll on entrepreneurs across the board.

Or even that the entrepreneurial culture is now mature enough now to realize that for all its many positives, at its core it’s a hyper stressful and challenging business model.

Exuberant when you exit and crushing for the majority that don’t.

Whatever the cause, this ennui is real and palpable, cropping up in friends and clients alike.

This year I feel it as well.

But the idea that there is a separation of work and life in any real way seems more myth and nostalgia than reality to me. I think we are chasing our tails looking for balance in all the wrong places.

I wonder whether this view of work and life as polar opposites has ever existed in a real sense.

Certainly within the culture of startups and creative endeavors, it’s simply an unnatural state.

So what’s going on?

When today we talk about the need to unplug and head to the beach we may certainly be looking for balance. We are pining for healing and a more uncluttered point of view.

Maybe we are looking for a truer sense of ourselves and an inside view of what it means to be happy.

I’m all in with this but I don’t think it has anything to do with compartmentalizing our lives.

In fact, I’m beginning to realize that technology itself, to many the culprit and the source of the problem, is in actuality a large part of the answer.

Think of it this way.

There is an innate conflict between the freneticism of an entrepreneurial activity and the aspirations for a balanced life.

That’s reality.

Neither our aspirations nor the day to day of work is going to change that.

That doesn’t obviate our natural need for quietude nor does it really mitigate the conflict.

What I aspire for is not disconnecting, but control and focus to be disconnected and still be in touch.

There are those whose ideal is a cabin with no connectivity and cutting the strings to free the mind.

To me nothing could be more stressful.

I want the overdraft of knowing that things are in control in real time so that I can do that 3-hour bike ride without my phone. So I can go diving or skiing for the afternoon knowing that I’ve managed the pieces of my life and business.

Here’s the rub.

You need to separate tech as a tool and tech as a busy box driving distraction.

Having everything in the cloud, always available from any device is a gift.

From finances to roll outs to calendars to knowing where the pieces are and communicating within context, at a click is what tech gives me. These tools, the front screen on my phone, are what make possible balance for me.

If you think that social nets are you most important marketing channel and need every second response—you are simply screwed—as well as wrong.

I’m a believer that the more seamless the integration of work and life I have the more balanced and productive I become.

This to me is about acceptance and embracing reality not pining for a different one.

The more I do this the less I find myself staring at my phone walking down the street.

As both a tech and personal wellness fanatic, this idea of personal and work integration is how I see, for myself, the key to being better at play and work both.

The gift of a connected world is just that we can always be connected and keep the pieces in sync and in our mind’s eye when they need to be.

It’s a bit of a bait and switch of course.

You can spend your time imagining a more separate world so you can truly relax.

Or you spend your time wiring stuff together so that you are free to choose and jump into each completely.

A wise friend said to me recently:

“You take yourself with you wherever you go”.

Embracing that is the only way for me to truly get beyond myself.