I’m not sure when it happened, but somewhere along the way we became simultaneously obsessed with the idea of work-life balance and painfully aware that it simply cannot be achieved. In my first job, it was called “work hard, play hard” – we were in our twenties, single, and didn’t have much else to be getting on with! Now, as a parent, it’s the impossible juggle. It’s both at the heart of the work that I do, and something I’m quite widely known for, and a concept that I just cannot stand.
The fallacy of work-life balance
Let’s start with the terminology itself: “work-life balance”. The problems start when you try to separate ‘work’ and ‘life’ as two distinct entities. As I’ve written many times over the years, work is a part of life – an important one, yes, but still just one part – and they are not mutually exclusive things to be set against each other. If we take the second part of the phrase, ‘balance’, it’s not too clear how we are supposed to measure that balance. If it’s number of hours, there is the elegant formula of 8-8-8, which is 8 hours of work, 8 hours of rest (sleep), and 8 hours of leisure. That in itself assumes that it is the amount of time spent on each area that we need to balance in some perfectly mathematical way, while it also ignores tthehat fact that the third set of 8 hours is not going to be ‘leisure’ but rather admin, housework, childcare, health, and a whole long list of to-dos we need to get through.
What we really mean here is “professional life” versus “personal life”. And because these two areas are pitted against each other, it means that more emphasis on personal life must mean less emphasis on work – bad for the employer, and bad for someone who still wants to pursue their professional ambitions. More work, in turn, means less focus on your family, health and all sorts of other sacrifices. I just don’t find this way of seeing things particularly helpful. It’s far too crude an interpretation of what reality actually looks like, assuming clear boundaries between paid and unpaid work, predictable hours, and, let’s face it, a single-income household where one individual is doing the paid work while the other takes care of the domestic.
The messiness of modern life
Modern life is more complicated. The lines are blurred, roles are muddled, and our lives don’t fit into neat compartments. Parents are taking a work call while waiting for the school run; creative ideas in today’s knowledge economy can arrive on a walk, not just at a desk; admin bleeds into evenings because there’s nowhere else to put it. We live incredibly integrated lives, both as human beings and as a result of technology allowing us to work anywhere, anytime. Pretending otherwise inevitably creates guilt and a sense of constant failure, where the individual is to blame for not managing it well enough.
We feel like we are “failing at balance” instead of questioning the model itself. Work inevitably becomes the rigid block, while life has to flex around it. Everything outside of our professional work feels squeezed, rushed, or secondary. So the trade-offs happen by default – balls are dropped, compromises are made – not by choice.
The rest of the essay explores why “balance” is the wrong goal for modern life – and how integration helps us make clearer, more intentional choices instead.
