For me, any attempt to achieve this mythical state, ends up feeling like standing on one leg on a narrow ledge. From time-to-time I have stress dreams about work, where I appear helpless while everything around me is going wrong, where everyone is either doing wrong, making it worse, or plain doesn’t care.
And while there was a time in my life when the balance was genuinely hard – a time when I was a single parent running a home and a small business full-time for the owner – these days I work part-time and am able to pursue my own interests/passions the rest of the time. Except, it hasn’t quite worked out that way…
I remember the day I upgraded my old “only make phones and texts” handset to a smart phone, and my boss sent me the instructions of how to pick up work emails on it. I didn’t even stop to think before doing so, as it felt like something that would never impinge on my personal life. And, in truth, for the next 10 years, it didn’t. I continued going into an office with my colleagues, and at the end of the working day, I went home and never gave it another thought until I returned the next day.
Eventually, we moved out of that office and started to work from our own homes, ‘cos we were all grown-up and professional and could be trusted to get stuff done. But then another change took place and the company shrunk in size until it was just 4 of us. Nevertheless, days, weeks, even months could pass without work threatening the balance of life… until I went on a pre-booked holiday, and one of the clients decided without giving any prior notice to make significant changes of the sort which require lots of hand-holding and management. So my holiday got trashed – ‘cos that’s the bit I do, and my colleagues all stayed firmly in their own lane.
I have now become used to this and am generally able to manage my clients so they avoid my pre-booked holidays, or (the more usual option) I book my absences around their planned changes. Last year was wall-to-wall days, weeks and months like this, till in the final month, all my work and planning came to naught and, I came close to chucking it all in.
Now, I know part of the problem is my nature, because what matters most to me is getting things done, finding solutions to problems, helping people. Yet I see oh so many people in the workplace suffering from burnout, so I know it’s not only having a nature like mine which is responsible.
Incremental changes – things like smart phones providing the ability to carry on working once home and outside of office hours, the cult of busyness and the glorification of work, personnel departments becoming human resource departments (and it not being just a name change but a change in the perception of employees as people vs a resource), the proliferation of wankers idiots in positions of power, the absurd expectations… all these play their part.
I’m reading a growing litany of complaints about the unwillingness of certain younger generations to work the way we’re used to working, and I wonder whether – in fact – they’re being smarter than my generation has been by their rejection of the old ways of working, in order to achieve a more healthy work-life balance.
What’s your view on the concept of a healthy work-life balance? Is it something to aspire to? Is it possible? What does it take?
© Debs Carey, 2025
debsdespatches.com 
I quit my high stress, long hours job when I became a parent, and did freelance stuff. We cut back our lifestyle drastically, as at the time I earned more. I think work life balance is basically bull unless you have a basic job and basic life, and by that i.mean you just do the stuff without any innovation or thought. I know this is not a popular opinion, but it’s my rhoughts
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I think this is a real problem these days. There aren’t enough guardrails around the limits on work time and there aren’t enough guardrails on expectations. I’m one of the lucky ones who’s now long since retired, but I definitely fell into that trap. I never stopped. At least I loved what I did, felt appreciated, and my kids had grown and left home by the time that rhythm began. I’m glad the younger generation isn’t buying into 24/7 work.
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I’ve come to believe that work life balance is something you accomplish over your entire life, not weekly or monthly. There are crazy busy times in your life and there are slower mellow times in your life— a kind of yin and yang. It’s when you lose the plot line of your life and go 24/7 that you become uncentered. The younger generations see this and understands it better than their elders.
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It’s never been what you’d call easy to achieve a work life balance, but I feel it has become more difficult – if not downright impossible – in recent years. As you say LA, there was a time when a person could make a choice and go for the big(ger) bucks and more demanding job, or less pay from a more basic job – which was fair. Now, even those with a basic job are finding demands growing to ridiculous levels, and that’s something which seriously bothers me. I hope the reaction of younger generations will cause a change, but with the state of the economy, even in first world nations, there are always too many who need to earn and so find themselves unable to do otherwise than accept the unacceptable.
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Like you Jane, I was fortunate in loving what I did, as well as having an amazing support system at the time when my daughter was young. The number of people leaving employment and setting up in business alone now is increasing and, unexpectedly, burnout is often the reason. From speaking to those making that choice, they’d rather risk the increased demands of working for themselves than continue to deal with unreasonable expectations of employers who treat them as nothing more than a resource, certainly not as a person. The squeeze is on, and I hope the attitude of the younger generation will start a sea change in employment practices, but I worry.
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An excellent observation there Ally – you’re absolutely spot on. It’s almost like you’re a professional in this social science stuff 🙂
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Work-life balance is hard if you are a people-pleaser and objective-oriented. It’s difficult to set a hard boundary when you want to make folks happy and finish a project–especially if your self-worth gets bound up in productivity. Good for the younger generation for having g greater innate self worth and avoiding that trap.
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Yup, that’s it exactly Autumn. And I absolutely doff my hat off to the young ‘uns for both having that wisdom *and* acting upon it.
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We’ve made it this way though, the idea of 24/7/365. If we want continual access to something, we forget someone has to be around to do it. But I also think we are an inefficient society
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There’s still a few places over here in the UK where shops are closed on Wednesday afternoon and Sundays, plus they close at 4pm on a Saturday. And definitely no evening openings. The first time I returned to it after being in London, I was very frustrated, but I rapidly became enamored of the thinking behind it.
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Your post reminded me of the struggles I had to maintain that balance before I retired. I was very customer-focused and found it hard to say “no” or even “not right now”. I have gotten rather selfish with my time now that I have more of it daily but less of it for the rest of my lifetime.
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I like “wankers” more 🤣
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However, people can buy things online 24/7. Shops open and closed doesn’t really matter
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I know that my final pre-retirement job afforded little work-life balance given that the pay was awful, people left the job all the time, and policies changed almost weekly- and not for the better. Loved the job but not the organization. It just kept getting worse and my manager knew I was the only responsible person so guess who kept getting all the texts and sad faced looks to help out? I just stopped answering my phone, even went to the point of telling her no that I would not travel to other sites to fill in while trying to manage my own site…and then after Covid I left. I still really miss the people and doing the job but my actual life was more important to me.
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Yup, sadly, the 24/7/365 world of availability is here to stay, and of course it requires people – usually those on the lowest level of pay – to staff them. It’s a conflict of convenience over principle.
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Deb, I hear that same tale told so often. It is appalling that it happens, it’s even worse that employers mercilessly push the buttons of those who care and are/or feel responsible in order to get things done. I’m glad that you were able to find a way to leave. But I despair of those who give great people like you no other option. It’s madness, and short-termism of the worst sort.
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Ha ha! Matt, I’m delighted you like it – I do too. I feel it says it all, as well as leaving no room for doubt over how an individual is viewed.
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Janis, I’m so pleased to hear that you’ve gotten “selfish” with your time. I doubt you actually have, but our time at the coal face makes us feel so if we simply put our well-being and needs first.
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So to what extent can we complain about a world we created?
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I think the younger generation “gets it” and should be applauded for prioritizing a work-life balance. I’ve studiously avoided adding Outlook to my phone to check work emails, because my time off the clock is precious to me and I don’t need that sort of temptation.
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I have a natural tendency to avoid over-committing. I tend to think of myself as a fairly calm person. But perhaps the opposite is true: I’m a person who is easily made anxious, so I plan my life to avoid that as much as possible. And I plan ahead so I’ll be ready important events. My mom often talked about one thing and another making her nervous. I wonder if that influenced me.
It helped to have lived overseas for many years where a full-time paid job was impossible and I had maids.
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Simply complaining has no purpose, but I do see the purpose in discussion, in examining our part in what’s happened, and to what extent we are prepared to either effect change or live with the consequences of it in order to align more closely with our principles and values. That’s why I find the behaviour of younger generations helpful, ‘cos they’re coming at it with a fresh set of eyes and – with luck – will enable older generations to open their eyes to other possibilities.
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Smart decision Mark. Easier not to get on that treadmill now than to get off it later.
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Nicki, I recall my mother admitting how she’d have struggled to cope with the demands of everyday life in the UK, having always had servants.
It does sound like you share that emotion with your mother – a form of generational trauma perhaps? I’d not realised how debilitating anxiety could be until suffering it myself, despite having lived with the impact of depression for ages. I can totally understand your advance planning in the face of it.
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Twenty years from now that generation will complain about this one. It’s inevitable that the young make decisions quickly without regard to the future and the decision of its impact. Zuckerberg created Facebook, but the millennials made it what it is
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I’m just a cockeyed optimist LA, I always have hope 🙂
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Agree with most of what you say, Debs. I was in a job where I was working all day every day, including weekends, and getting complained at for not doing more. And, like you, it crept up incrementally. I retired close on my 60th birthday and I’ve been part time ever since.
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Rosemary, it only started to really bother me after I went part-time. And, this one, is entirely my fault in that I accepted my boss’s requirement that although I only work part-time (and get paid part-time), there is an expectation that I still take care of clients when I’m not working. Yeah. I know, stupid me. I remember nodding while thinking that type of event will be as rare as dodo droppings so no harm just agreeing to it. Oh how wrong I was… I mean, it was rare as for a few years, until it wasn’t anymore. The only way out was for me to leave, or to wait out the company’s (now imminent) winding up. After that, all I have to do is find another job which will be *properly* part-time.
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I know what you mean about part-time. It can creep up on you. Then there are oh-so-keen types who put in extra and expect you to too.
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You’re spot on with that observation Rosemary. The difficulty is the business is the boss’s baby, so he would always give everything to it and cannot understand why his employees don’t feel the same way. And he’s too old to learn (or maybe I’m too old to bother with teaching him).
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