The Balanced Engineer • Issue #33
Learning from aging, valuing what truly matters and building a personal brand.
The Balanced Engineer Newsletter
Week of August 18, 2025 • Issue # 33
⚖️ Work-Life Integration
Sustainable practices for long-term success
The Best Years of Your Life by Hidden Brain (Podcast Link)
Summary: This podcast isn't very software engineering focused, but it felt very being-a-human-focused. It features an interview with psychologist Laura Carstensen, who studies aging and what we can learn from folks at older ages. In particular, it describes how our emotions change as we age, often for the better!
Why this resonates: I had a few key takeaways from listening to this:
- Lots of relationships are built out of circumstance, or folks looking for the same thing at the same time. People are more likely to make a lot of friends at the beginning of college, when they're most open to meeting new folks, than at the end. This makes me think of the number of people that I hear say they love their job "because of the people". I think that applies to pretty much everywhere I've worked. It's better because of the people at it, more so than the work or the mission or the benefits.
- Throughout our lives we move from being future-focused to being present-focused. That's why it's much more difficult to "live life in the moment" at younger ages. This seems like a worthwhile thing to learn earlier rather than later.
- Average lifespans have increased a lot in the past century. It's unlikely that folks are going to be able to work for 40 years to pay for 30 years of not working (i.e., retirement). Perhaps in the future retirement may look different (working fewer hours per week instead of 40).
The final thing I learned, listening to this episode convinced me to take a bit of time to re-focus myself. I'm taking a bit of a break from the grind to think more critically about what is most important to me. That's also why I'm only sharing one thing this week.
Tags: Work-life balance
🎯 Try This
One small thing to practice this week
Think about whether what you're doing right now is the most important thing for you to be working on.
Evaluate what you have going on right now. If this were the last month of your life, are these the things you would want to be doing? If not, what can you change to get yourself there?
What I've Been Building
A quick look at what I've been working on this week
- Overcommitted: Ep. 20 | Developing your personal brand as a software engineer - Personal branding feels a bit cringey, but it exists whether you think about it or not!
- Overcommitted Book Club: Check out the insights from participant's read of the sixth chapter of Looks Good To Me!
- Illustration: I've been thinking quite a bit recently about Sisyphean tasks.
Have comments or questions about this newsletter? Or just want to be internet friends? Send me an email at brittany@balancedengineer.com or reach out on Bluesky or LinkedIn.