Beyond “Work/Life” Balance
Why this Anachronistic Language Has Failed Us
A few days ago, I posted an Instagram story featuring a photo of my youngest son and a few lines about why I dislike the term “work/life balance.” I received a huge number of supportive DMs in response so thought I’d do a deep dive on precisely what is wrong with this hackneyed phrase and how (if at all) we can replace it with something that better reflects individuality and the true complexities of life. It seems only fair that the photo accompanying this article is of my elder son.
There are phrases that survive in management culture not because they are precise, or positive or even that helpful but because they are convenient. “work/life balance” is one of them. It appears everywhere: in recruitment campaigns, leadership speeches, HR frameworks, employee surveys, wellbeing policies, conference panels, consultancy decks and the self-congratulatory messaging of organisations eager to signal modernity and care. It has become one of those expressions that sounds so obviously right that many people stop listening to what it actually says.
I have for a long time disliked the term, not because I want to keep people chained to their desks, but because I think a balance of work and everything else in life is too important to be trapped inside such an awful pithy phrase which really does give off the vibe that “you’re lucky to be working here because we let you see your family.” “Work/life balance” is reductive. It sounds faintly bureaucratic, dated, as though it emerged fully formed from an HR away day sometime in the late 1990s, where a group of people in name badges decided that the unruly problem of human flourishing could be contained in a phrase that would sit neatly on a slide. The expression carries all the marks of late-managerial language: tidy, plausible, abstract, and faintly patronising. It sounds humane while flattening the humanity it claims to respect.
My objection is not semantic fussiness. Language matters because language shapes thought, and thought shapes policy, and policy shapes the daily texture of human lives. If we talk about “work” and “life” as though they are two separate, rival substances that must be held in correct proportion, then we are already thinking badly. We are imagining the human person as a set of competing compartments rather than as a whole. We are assuming that “work” is one thing and “life” is another, when in reality work is part of life, and life consists of far more than the residue left over when we finally leave work for the day.
This asymmetry is the first and most obvious problem with the phrase: it collapses nearly everything of value into a single catch-all category called “life.” Love, friendship, marriage, sex, parenthood, grief, reading, travel, exercise, reflection, conversation, music, food, laughter, beauty, solitude, art, play, learning, sport, exercise, memory, joy, sorrow, healing, community, growth, adventure and rest are all bundled together as though they were one homogeneous thing.
All human beings are unique, complex characters. Human adults are the product of many factors; geography, culture, family, personal experience, religion, health, wealth, politics, education, peer group; I could go on and there are plenty of studies you can easily find, along with your own life experience, to illustrate this. My personal life experience, priorities, aspirations, likes and dislikes are unique to me as they are to the people living next door or on the other side of the world.
The concept of two competing elements for all human employees of a particular organisation is therefore absurd. On one side: work. On the other: everything else that makes existence worth inhabiting.
Even before one gets to the empirical research, the phrase fails as a description of the human condition. Human beings do not live bifurcated lives in which the hours spent working somehow cease to count as life. Those hours are lived hours. They shape mood, health, relationships, identity, status, self-respect and one’s sense of meaning. Work can be depleting, exploitative and deadening, yes. But it can also be absorbing, dignifying, creative, socially connective and morally serious. Work is not the opposite of life. It is one of the places in which life happens.
“Balance” is also an unconvincing ideal. The image invoked is usually that of scales: work on one side, life on the other, with the good life consisting in some stable equilibrium between them. But flourishing is not a still point. Lives are lived in seasons. There are times when professional commitment properly intensifies, times when family does, times when illness or bereavement reorders everything, times for travel, times for study, times for caregiving, times for risk, times for maintenance, times for solitude, times for exuberance. Very little of this resembles a balancing act. It resembles movement, responsiveness, judgement and adaptation.
My problem with “work/life balance”, then, is not only that it is vague. It is that it frames the question clumsily. It encourages us to think in binaries where a richer moral, psychological and social vocabulary is required.
This criticism is supported by the scholarly literature itself. Researchers have repeatedly noted that the term lacks conceptual clarity. One review observed that there is “no widely accepted definition or measure of work-life balance currently” and that this absence hinders both theory and practical application. Another line of academic work has pointed out that assumptions about what counts as balance vary dramatically between individuals, occupations, genders and life stages. Some people understand balance as equal time allocation; others as subjective satisfaction; others as low conflict between roles; others as autonomy over when and where work is done. Once a concept can mean all these things, it begins to lose explanatory force.
A chapter titled “Questioning the balance of work and life: some philosophical observations” makes the essential point crisply: “A basic assumption that underlies the work-life interface is the balance between work and life.” The power of that observation lies in its simplicity. The assumption has become invisible precisely because it is so widely repeated. Yet assumptions are where serious inquiry must begin. Why should “balance” be the governing metaphor? Why should work and life be conceptualised as separate domains in the first place? What moral vision of the person is smuggled into that language? And whose interests are served by maintaining it?
To answer those questions, it helps to widen the lens beyond management literature and into philosophy, psychology, sociology and organisational studies. The term “work/life balance” appears neutral, but it is not. It reflects a particular historical moment and a particular way of organising economic and personal life. It belongs to a world in which work became increasingly mobile, increasingly professionalised, increasingly cognitive for some classes of worker, yet also increasingly demanding and invasive. It emerged as a managerial response to strains that modern organisations themselves had helped produce. As such, the phrase was always both critique and containment: a recognition that things had gone too far, and a way of addressing the problem without challenging too many underlying assumptions.
There is no need to deny that the phrase once did useful work. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it gave legitimacy to concerns that had often been dismissed. It helped make visible the incompatibility between rigid employment structures and the realities of family life. It allowed employees to ask for flexibility without appearing unserious. It gave organisations a framework, however limited, for discussing reduced hours, job shares, part-time roles and home working. In that sense, it represented a real improvement over cruder models of employment in which workers were expected simply to absorb every demand. I’d be wrong to overlook that achievement.
But concepts can be historically useful and conceptually exhausted at the same time. The phrase has reached that point. In 2026, we know too much about human wellbeing, occupational stress, social inequality, care responsibilities, identity formation and digital working life to continue relying on such a blunt instrument. We need language that is more exacting, more humane and more honest about what modern work asks of people.
Philosophy helps here because it reminds us that the point of a life is not simply to manage competing inputs efficiently. Aristotle’s notion of eudaimonia, usually translated as flourishing, is a far better starting point than “balance”. Flourishing does not mean dividing one’s days correctly between an office and whatever lies beyond it. It means living well in the fullest sense: cultivating virtues, exercising capacities, forming sound relationships, participating in community and ordering one’s activities towards a good life as a whole. This is a vision of human existence as integrated rather than partitioned. Aristotle would have understood that work matters because it forms part of a life, but he would not have mistaken the regulation of hours for the substance of flourishing.
The same is true, in a different register, of John Stuart Mill’s defence of “experiments in living”. Mill’s importance here lies in his resistance to standardisation. The good life cannot be reduced to one model and issued as a policy template. Individuals differ in temperament, aspiration, obligation, energy, vocation and circumstance. One person may be nourished by professional intensity, another by their deep local roots, another by artistic practice, another by family-centred domesticity, another by public service, another by enterprise and risk. The phrase “work/life balance” obscures this pluralism by pretending to offer a universal ideal while remaining frustratingly underspecified.
Hannah Arendt’s distinctions between labour, work and action are also illuminating. Her categories were not designed to solve managerial dilemmas, but they expose the inadequacies of current terminology. For Arendt, labour refers to the cyclical activities necessary for biological survival; work to the fabrication of a more durable human world; action to the realm of speech, plurality and public life. Whether or not one follows her scheme in full, it becomes difficult after reading her to treat all productive activity as one blob called “work”, opposed to another blob called “life”. Human existence consists of many modes of doing, making, caring and appearing. To flatten that complexity into a binary is intellectually lazy.
Simone de Beauvoir adds another critical dimension. Her analyses of freedom and social constraint, and her focus on the ways in which women’s lives are organised by structures they did not choose, make it impossible to discuss “work/life balance” innocently. The category of “life” has historically contained vast quantities of unpaid domestic labour and emotional management, much of it performed by women and much of it going uncounted for. The phrase can therefore function ideologically, disguising inequalities under a neutral-sounding formulation. If one partner’s “life” consists partly of being available to absorb the practical burdens that enable the other partner’s career, balance may look very different depending on where one stands.
Modern writers on vulnerability and wholeness help extend this critique into the organisational sphere. Brené Brown’s work has had unusual influence because it gave a broad professional readership language for ideas that had long been marginal in corporate settings: vulnerability, courage, shame, trust, belonging, wholeheartedness. However one judges the academic depth of parts of her work, her impact is undeniable. She helped normalise the idea that human beings cannot indefinitely separate professional identity from emotional reality without cost. If leaders talk seriously about trust, psychological safety and courage, then they are already conceding that the self at work is not a detachable instrument. The person who enters a workplace brings their fears, history, dignity, longing and need for connection with them. The old binary becomes impossible to sustain.
This is one reason why so many people have sought alternatives such as “work-life integration”, “work-life fit” or “work-life harmony”. These alternatives are attempts to move away from the image of two opposed weights on a scale. One popular critique of the term, “Why I Hate the Phrase ‘Work Life Balance’”, expresses this vividly by objecting to the image of “a balance scale with two weights on it”. Its proposed alternative, “work life harmony”, is attractive because harmony allows for plurality, movement and changing emphasis. One does not need equal volume from every instrument at every moment to produce a good piece of music.
Even these alternatives need scrutiny and I think there’s still an echo of the hackneyed, old phrase present in all of them. “Integration” can easily become a euphemism for work’s annexation of the rest of life. If integration means the office in the kitchen, email in the playground, and permanent availability carried in one’s pocket, then it is not a liberation from the old framework but a further victory for work’s expansion. Harmony, too, can sound too soft and too smooth. Real lives contain friction, contradiction and tragedy. Sometimes domains do conflict. Sometimes values collide. Sometimes there is no elegant synthesis, only difficult choice. The challenge is not to find a perfect replacement slogan, but to step outside the anachronistic conceptual frame altogether.
Psychology provides some of the strongest reasons for doing so. The impact of overworking on human beings is not speculative. It has been studied extensively across occupational health, organisational psychology, psychiatry and public health. We know that chronic overwork can produce emotional exhaustion, impaired concentration, anxiety, depression, sleep disturbance, irritability, strained relationships and diminished capacity for joy. We know that it is associated, in some contexts, with substance misuse, cardiovascular risk and increased mortality. We know that people are not endlessly elastic.
Christina Maslach’s work on burnout remains foundational. Burnout is commonly defined through three dimensions: emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation or cynicism, and a reduced sense of personal accomplishment. What matters here is that burnout is not simply tiredness, nor is it merely the result of an individual’s failure to rest sufficiently. It often arises from prolonged exposure to chronic workplace stressors: overload, low control, insufficient reward, breakdown of community, unfairness and value conflict. Those categories are crucial because they move us away from the fantasy that a person can solve a structurally induced crisis by “balancing” better. The problem is often not time management. It is a mismatch between human needs and institutional conditions.
The World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization have jointly highlighted the dangers of long working hours, linking them to increased risk of stroke and ischaemic heart disease. The significance of this research is moral as well as medical. It tells us that what is often discussed in polite corporate language as a matter of balance or flexibility is, in some cases, an issue of bodily harm. Chronic overwork does not simply produce a less pretty lifestyle. It can damage minds, bodies and relationships in enduring ways.
Robert Karasek’s Job Demand-Control model and its later developments are also instructive. The model suggests that high job demands become especially stressful when combined with low control. Social support later emerged as another critical variable. This matters enormously for any serious conversation about work and life because it shows that not all effort is experienced equally. Two people may work long hours, yet one experiences the work as meaningful, autonomous and socially supported, while the other experiences it as coercive, monitored and isolating. A crude “balance” framework risks treating them as equivalent because it focuses on the quantity of time rather than the quality of the working experience.
Self-Determination Theory, developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, sharpens the point. Human beings, on this account, have basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness. When these are supported, work can be energising and growth-promoting. When they are frustrated, work can become deadening and distressing. This is a profound challenge to the common assumption that the problem is simply too much work crowding out life. Sometimes the problem is indeed excess. But sometimes the problem is alienation: work organised in ways that deny agency, deny mastery and thin out human connection. The solution is therefore not only to protect more time away from work, but to make work itself more consonant with human flourishing.
This is where the management literature becomes particularly revealing. Organisations often speak as though the work/life question is one of boundary management: how can employees better separate or combine professional and personal demands? That is part of it, but only part. A much harder question is whether work is being designed and led in a way that respects human beings as ends rather than means. Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford has been especially forceful in arguing that many workplace practices are bad for human health. Long hours, job insecurity, lack of control, inadequate social support and toxic managerial cultures are not unfortunate side effects. They are often built into systems of organising. When that is the case, work/life programmes can become decorative rather than substantive.
Research from leading universities and business schools in the UK and USA has repeatedly pointed in the same direction. Studies from Harvard, Stanford, LSE, Oxford, Cambridge and elsewhere have explored the links between autonomy, workload, job quality, flexibility, mental health and retention. One recurring insight is that flexibility, while valuable, is not enough if cultures punish those who use it. Another is that the norm of the “ideal worker” still exerts extraordinary force. This ideal worker is always available, unencumbered by caring obligations, willing to travel, quick to reply, ready to stretch and visibly devoted. It is an image built on outdated assumptions about gender, class and domestic support. It is also deeply corrosive.
In many professional settings, overwork is not merely required; it is performed. People signal importance by being busy, committed by being exhausted, valuable by being unavailable for everything except work. The sociologist Erin Reid and others have shown how workplaces often reward the appearance of constant devotion, even when actual productivity gains are marginal or imaginary. This helps explain why so many “work/life balance” policies exist in companies where employees remain afraid to use them. The formal policy says one thing; the prestige system says another. In such contexts, the phrase “work/life balance” can operate as a kind of institutional alibi.
That is why the question of management failure matters. Is the persistence of such reductive language merely lazy habit, or does it reveal something more troubling about how organisations think? I suspect it reveals both. At one level, it is just cliché: a phrase repeated because everyone recognises it. But at a deeper level, it reflects a managerial preference for simplified, administrable categories. “Balance” sounds measurable. It sounds like something that can be surveyed, benchmarked and improved through interventions. It translates existential complexity into a programme.
There is an understandable temptation here. Managers need frameworks. Organisations cannot operate entirely in poetry. Yet when a framework becomes too crude, it ceases to illuminate and begins to distort. Worse still, it can disguise where responsibility truly lies. If an employee is depleted, conflicted, disconnected from their children, unable to care for an ageing parent, and quietly unravelling under impossible demands, it is very convenient for the organisation to frame this as a balance issue. The implication is that the employee must rebalance. But rebalance what, exactly, if the workload is structurally unreasonable, the staffing model inadequate, the expectations unspoken but severe, and the culture rewarding permanent responsiveness?
This is where the critique broadens into power. The language of “work/life balance” can sometimes conceal a desire not simply to support employees, but to regulate them.
Once life becomes a factor in productivity, organisations develop an interest in managing it. Wellness initiatives, resilience training, mindfulness programmes, sleep advice, nutrition seminars and digital detox campaigns may all be beneficial in themselves, though in my experience are simply there to protect a business when work and life are so unbalanced that an employee’s health is severely damaged. But they can also participate in a wider logic in which the worker is expected to optimise their entire existence in service of sustained performance. Michel Foucault’s work on discipline and self-regulation hovers in the background here. Modern control often works through the internalisation of norms. People come to manage themselves in accordance with institutional expectations, blaming themselves when they cannot bear what should never have been normal.
This is not an argument against resilience, therapy, exercise or boundaries. Those things matter greatly. It is an argument against depoliticising strain. Not every exhausted person is simply in need of a better evening routine. Sometimes they are experiencing the rational bodily and emotional consequences of being asked to live against the grain of human limits.
The British and American evidence on overwork bears this out. Long-hours cultures remain deeply entrenched in certain sectors: law, finance, medicine, consulting, technology, parts of academia and leadership roles across industries. In many of these settings, the rewards can be considerable: status, money, influence, stimulation, camaraderie. That is part of what makes the trap powerful. People are not simply coerced; they are often seduced. Ambition, identity and validation become intertwined. A person may genuinely love aspects of their work and still be destroyed by its totalising claims. This complexity matters because it prevents the conversation from collapsing into anti-work sentiment. The problem is not that work matters too much to people. It is that work can too easily become the organising axis around which all other goods must negotiate for leftovers.
Philosophically, one might say that work has expanded beyond its proper scope. It has become not only a means of earning, contributing or creating, but a primary source of identity, community, esteem and self-explanation. In the absence of strong civic, religious, local or familial anchors, work has absorbed functions once distributed across social life more broadly. This helps explain why the phrase “work/life balance” is both popular and inadequate. It is popular because people experience work as overwhelmingly consequential. It is inadequate because the deeper problem is not hours alone, but the social overinvestment of meaning in paid work.
One sees this clearly in the language people use about themselves. They say they are “what they do”, or that they “are their job”, or that stepping back would mean “disappearing”. Such statements are psychologically intelligible, especially in prestige economies. But they are also dangerous. If work becomes the primary site of worth, then any boundary around it will feel like loss rather than sanity. No amount of balance rhetoric will solve that. What is needed is a cultural shift in the hierarchy of values.
That shift must include care. Few areas expose the poverty of the old phrase more clearly than parenting and caregiving. To speak of “balancing work and life” in this context is almost offensively thin. Parenting is not a hobby on the life side of the ledger. Nor is caring for an ill partner, supporting a disabled child, or walking a parent through dementia. These are among the most morally weighty dimensions of adulthood. They should not be treated as residual categories around which work may or may not be flexibly arranged. A decent society and a decent organisation should begin by recognising care as central to human life rather than peripheral to economic productivity.
Feminist scholarship has made this point for decades. The supposed neutrality of workplace norms often masks the fact that those norms were built around a worker who has someone else taking care of life. Even where formal equality has improved, the deep structure of many organisations still assumes a body untroubled by pregnancy, a household supported by invisible labour, and a worker whose attention can be given wholly to work when required. “Work/life balance” can soften the edges of this arrangement without changing its foundation. It sounds compassionate while preserving the idea that care is an accommodation rather than a norm.
The same moral thinness appears in how the phrase handles joy, beauty and play. One of the saddest features of contemporary professional culture is the way it often treats everything outside work as recovery for work rather than as intrinsically good. This is where is have an issue with the Steven Bartletts of this world. Sleep becomes fuel. Exercise becomes productivity enhancement. Holidays become reset periods. Friendship becomes networking with better wine. Reading becomes self-improvement. Even mindfulness is marketed as a way to become more effective under pressure. The logic of optimisation spreads everywhere. Under this logic, “life” is no longer truly life. It is maintenance or worse, something else on which to gather data and analyse metrics.
That is why I resist the phrase so strongly. It reflects and reinforces a mentality in which the purpose of non-work is too often to repair the worker for further work. But life is not a repair shop for labour. A great life includes things that do not justify themselves in economic terms: long meals, bad jokes, music listened to properly, aimless walks, hours with one’s children, making something unnecessary but beautiful, reading a novel with no practical outcome, sitting with grief, learning for the pleasure of understanding, travelling not to post about it but to be changed by it. These are not luxuries appended to the real business of life. They are among the reasons life matters.
Literature often sees this more clearly than management theory. Novelists have long understood what organisations often miss: that identity, aspiration, duty, regret, love and status are entangled, and that the cost of ambition is rarely borne by the ambitious person alone. From George Eliot to Virginia Woolf to contemporary fiction about work and burnout, literature reveals the emotional granularity that corporate language smooths away. Poetry, too, has always known that a human life is not an optimisation problem. Art resists managerial reduction because it insists on singularity, texture and felt reality.
Music offers an especially apt counter-metaphor (I’m drawing on my GCSE in music for some of this). Balance suggests equal weight. Music suggests relation. A good life is less like a set of scales than like a composition in time. Different themes emerge, recede, return and transform. There are crescendos and rests, counterpoint and silence, dissonance and resolution. Some passages are strenuous, some light, some mournful, some ecstatic. What matters is not equal intensity everywhere, but coherence, depth and responsiveness. This does not mean life is easy or elegant. Many great compositions contain tension. So do great lives.
The sociologist Hartmut Rosa’s concept of resonance captures something essential here. Rosa argues that the good life is not one of total control or endless acceleration, but one in which we are in living relation with the world: responsive to people, places, work, art, nature and history in ways that move us and to which we can respond. Resonance is not the same as comfort. It can include difficulty and transformation. But it stands sharply against the deadening instrumentalism that marks so much contemporary experience. In a resonant life, work may be one site of relation and meaning, but not the only one. Nor should it drown out the others.
Positive psychology, for all its simplifications, also points us beyond the binary. Martin Seligman’s PERMA framework (positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment) is helpful not because it is definitive, but because it is plural. It recognises that wellbeing is made of different goods that cannot all be reduced to one metric. Accomplishment matters, yes. So do relationships. So does meaning. So does engagement. Work can supply some of these goods, but not all of them, and not for everyone in the same way. A person can be high in accomplishment and low in joy; high in engagement at work and low in relational depth elsewhere. Any serious account of a life must be capable of seeing this complexity.
The practical implications for leadership are substantial. If we move beyond “work/life balance”, then leaders must stop congratulating themselves merely for offering flexibility and start asking more difficult questions. Is the work itself meaningful? Are workloads credible? Are teams staffed adequately? Do line managers understand the human consequences of their behaviour? Are expectations around responsiveness explicit and humane? Are promotions tied to visible overwork? Are parents, carers and those with complicated lives quietly penalised? Does the culture treat rest as respectable or as weakness? Is “wellbeing” being used to compensate for poor design? Do those who know how to “play the game” get promoted above more talented colleagues with different priorities?
These are not soft questions. They are questions about performance, retention, ethics and sustainability. A workplace that consumes people indiscriminately may achieve bursts of output, but it will also generate burnout, mistrust, poor judgement, attrition and hidden cost. Sustainable excellence requires more than talent and drive. It requires conditions in which human beings can remain whole enough to think clearly, relate honestly and recover properly.
For individuals, moving beyond the old phrase also changes the task. The goal is not to achieve some mythical perfect division between office time and “life time”. It is to cultivate a life architecture in which work has a proper place. That may mean embracing ambition while refusing totalisation. It may mean recognising that some seasons call for more work, but not mistaking those seasons for destiny. It may mean making hard trade-offs consciously rather than drifting into them. It certainly means asking not only “How can I fit life around work?” but “What kind of life am I actually trying to build?”
That question is more demanding than balance because it requires values, not just scheduling. What do I want my children to remember? What kind of friend am I becoming? What is my body telling me? What forms of beauty, service or community am I neglecting? What ambitions are truly mine and which have been inherited from prestige culture? What does enough look like? What can only be done now? What losses am I incurring that no promotion can reverse? These are adult questions. “Work/life balance” is often too flimsy to hold them.
It is also worth saying that a holistic approach does not require anti-work romanticism. Work matters deeply. Good work can structure time, sharpen skill, create solidarity, provide economic security and offer genuine meaning. Many people draw enormous satisfaction from their professions, trades and enterprises. There is nothing ignoble in that. The alternative to “work/life balance” is not work’s diminishment into a regrettable necessity. It is work’s relocation into a broader moral ecology. Work is one of the significant things in life, but not the sovereign thing.
This distinction matters particularly in an era when younger generations are often caricatured as either work-obsessed or work-shy. In truth, many are asking a healthier question: not how to avoid effort, but how to avoid giving themselves to systems that promise identity and take too much in return. Their scepticism towards inherited corporate language may be one of the more intelligent features of the current moment. They have seen burnout up close. They have seen parents miss too much. They have seen the smartphone colonise home life. They are right to be suspicious of phrases that sound supportive while leaving power arrangements untouched.
A serious business culture in 2026 should therefore retire “work/life balance” with gratitude for whatever usefulness it once had and clarity about why it is no longer enough. In its place, we need a richer vocabulary: flourishing, wholeness, sustainability, meaningful work, humane leadership, life design, care, dignity, resonance, seasonality, boundaries, depth. This list is not exhaustive and none of these suggestions is perfect, but together they are truer to the complexity of actual living.
Most of all, we need to remember that a person is not a unit of productivity with a private life attached. A person is a whole creature with a finite span of years, a body that tires, relationships that require presence, capacities that develop, sorrows that wound, pleasures that renew, and a need for meaning that no performance review can fully address. Work belongs within that life. It should not stand outside it as an adversary, nor sit above it as a master.
The phrase “work/life balance” fails because it cannot say any of this. It notices a tension but names it badly. It assumes two spheres where there are many. It imagines equilibrium where there is movement. It personalises what is often structural. It offers management language for existential realities. And because it sounds benign, it can prevent better questions from being asked.
In 2026, we should step away from this term. Not because balance, in the ordinary sense, never matters. Of course, proportion matters. Rest matters. Time matters. Limits matter. But the phrase itself is too reductive for the age we are in and the knowledge we now possess. We need a more holistic approach — one that recognises career, travel, love, marriage, friendship, exercise, learning, parenting, art, literature, food, music, joy, tragedy, play, service and stillness not as “everything else”, but as the very substance of a life.
A rich life is not built by balancing two abstract competing categories against one another. It is built by attending, over time, to the many forms of nourishment that make a human being fully alive. Some of these will come through work. Some will come despite work. Some will come in places no employer can ever reach. The point is not to keep the scales level. The point is to live deeply and well.
Work is part of life, but only one part. It can be meaningful, important and even beautiful. But it should sit within a larger vision of what life is for: love, relationships, friendship, growth, movement, beauty, thought, laughter, contribution, care, memory and joy. Not a balancing act. A life.