Why it’s time we stopped obsessing over ‘work-life balance’

If I had an eraser that could magically scrub away any common phrase from our collective minds, I’d use it to delete a phrase that’s become so overused it has started to lose any real meaning: work-life balance.

It’s a relatively modern expression, coined somewhere around the 1970s when we properly started to think out loud about how to name the natural see-saw between the hours we spend toiling away at work versus the hours we spend doing everything else that life involves.

Work-life balance may sound like a relatively innocuous term, but I have some major gripes with it.Credit: Ryan Osland.

For most of history, humans have viewed work in a pretty negative way. The Ancient Greeks’ word for work, ponos, roughly translates as sorrow or hardship. The Romans viewed work the same, heaping inequality onto the pile as lower-class slaves performed arduous work so that others could enjoy their leisure.

In the Middle Ages, work was primarily a way to gain food, and then the First Industrial Revolution in the mid-18th century increased our output and ambition with the invention of machinery.

That’s when the concept of balancing work with life fully emerged, but it didn’t get a catchy name for another two centuries or so. Even then, it began with a small trickle, with less than 10 research studies on work–life balance published annually until the turn of the millennium, before exploding exponentially where now around 200 papers on the topic are released every year, mostly from the US, UK and Australia.

I understand the interest. Too many of us are now working longer hours than ever, wondering where does work end and the rest of our life begin? But I still have two main gripes with “work-life balance” that we really need to talk about.

It’s a message that can be difficult to deliver to a society that’s been fed hustle culture and girlbossing, but it’s a truth we all need to hear.

The first is that its very name implies that work and life are two equal and opposite entities, as though each of them sit on a scale, fifty-fifty, both as important as the other.

Work and life are not, and should never be, equal. Work is the labour you’re paid for after completing tasks set out by your employer, or yourself if you run your own business. Life, on the other hand, is the broad spectrum of activities that are the real reason we’re all here on this planet for this tiny speck of time.

Our life consists of our relationships with family and friends, our communities, faith, hobbies and interests. It’s also our minds, bodies and everything we do to keep them as healthy as we can. Your life, what you want to do, who you want to be, how you spend your time, is infinitely more important than any work you will ever do.

Sometimes that message can be difficult to deliver to a society that’s been fed hustle culture, girlbossing and leaning in, but it’s a harsh truth we all need to hear.

The second issue is with actual words itself. There are dozens of alternatives that float around, like work-life juggle, harmony, integration, equilibrium, fit and symmetry. I could continue with a thesaurus of options, but none of them address the bigger issue that by putting “work” at the beginning of the phrase we are implying that is the more important of the two.

I do have a solution to this whole mess, however, and it’s to swap the words around. Instead of talking about “work-life balance”, we should refer to it as “life-work balance”. This deceptively simple reframe doesn’t erase all the negatives around the concept, but it does go some way to reclaiming life as the most important part that we should always put first.

So the next time you hear someone talking about “work-life balance”, just casually invert the phrase to be “life-work balance” instead. You’ll be amazed at how powerful this one small change can be.

Tim Duggan is the author of Work Backwards: The Revolutionary Method to Work Smarter and Live Better. He writes a regular newsletter at timduggan.substack.com

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