How’s your work-life balance? It’s a dumb phrase, isn’t it? Suggestive of a perfect equilibrium that is really quite achievable if only you take the trouble to move the little lead weights called “work”, “time”, “money”, “friends”, “family”, “sex”’, “health” and “fun” into the right places on either side of the fulcrum. But it isn’t like that, as we know. There is a work-life crisis in the developed world (the phrase has only been around since the early 1980s) which leads three quarters of us to involve some version of it in our new year’s resolutions each year, determining to put a bit more energy into whichever part of the balance isn’t working – “I’ll drink less so that I can work harder”; “I’ll do more…

Source: The Times January 12, 2019 00:00 UTC