I was not long in the workforce before I started hearing a lot about a certain mythic state of equipoise called the "work-life balance." The core message seemed to be that "work" was something odious to be minimized, because the only worthwhile "living" occurred out of work hours. Indeed, the data certainly support the claim that workers are putting in more hours than at any time since abolition (1865 in the US); however, I am not convinced that this always translates into an unbalanced or incomplete life.
Since the time I started working full-time in 1984, I have not shied away from hard work. However, none of my wife, kids or I believe that I have sacrificed family or personal happiness at the alter of Mammon. Rather than a very sharp, black and white separation between work and life, technology and more flexible work practices are beginning to blur the distinction between work and personal life. Taken to an extreme, the constantly buzzing Blackberry can ruin the family dinner or story-telling time; however, fax machines, laptops, Blackberries, I-Phones and home broadband have made it possible in recent years to blend work and life -- at least for many office workers.
Moreover, to insist on a rigid work-life balance always suggests to me that work is some awful Anglo-Saxon torture visited upon the otherwise "free" soul of Rousseau's natural man. I recognize, of course, that throughout my working life I have been fortunate to work in safe, relatively high-paying white collar jobs that provide intellectual challenge, but my point is that it is precisely in these environments that we hear most about "work-life balance." One need not be a Calvinist to believe that useful work can also contribute to a life well-lived.
There is little new in this. At college (university for those outside the US), my classmates divided quite evenly between those who left dorm room or apartment to go work at the library, and those of us for whom reading Balzac did not seem to be hard labor to be performed only in a salt mine, and who happily stayed at home balancing "work" and "life."
Lest this post appear like a paid advertisement by the Business Roundtable on the rewards of capitalism, I remind you that no businessman has ever declared on his deathbed that his life would have been fulfilled had he only had time for one more conference call.