Everybody these days loves to talk about work-life balance, like it’s almost a human right.
To our ancient ancestors, that would have sounded ludicrous.
The Ancient Greeks had work-life balance, for sure. The slaves did the work and the elites did the living.
No 20,000 BC Cro-Magnon man ever called off a hunt because it interfered with his work-life balance. No Medieval peasant called off the bringing in the harvest because he thought, “I just need more time to work on myself.”
But then the Industrial Revolution came along and suddenly our world wasn’t governed by natural things like sunset and the seasons, but by the clock.
Today? A 2022 survey found that 56% of employees now prioritize quality personal time over high salaries.
Work has to merge with jogging, gaming, dating and sleeping. Half-empty offices tell the rest of the story.
What we seem to have forgotten is that work used to be who we were. Not what we did for money.
Medieval surnames came directly from occupations because work was identity. Around the 11th century, everyone knew who John the Baker was versus John the Miller. Your work was literally your signature.
The word "vocation" comes from Latin vocatio—literally meaning "a call, summons." Originally, a divine calling.
That’s what we lost somewhere between the assembly line and the cubicle.
We started treating work as a burden instead of a calling.
At the heart of this struggle lies an erroneous assumption: that work is something to be endured rather than embraced. The late economist David Graeber’s theory of "Bullshit Jobs" reinforced this divide, framing modern labor as meaningless drudgery.
But this makes work the enemy of life. It’s something that happens to us rather than something we direct and master.
The problem here isn’t so much a lack of work-life balance (something that never even occurred to previous generations) but a lack of meaning. Agency. Autonomy. Pride. Social worth. Contribution. Mastery.
Vocation.
Perhaps the solution isn’t more leisure, more so-called “balance”, but long-term work worth committing to: purposeful, engaging, challenging, worthy of dedication.
We are human beings, with a very long history to prove it.
Our ancestors didn’t balance being a goldsmith against being human – being a goldsmith was how they expressed their humanity.
We don’t need better balance. We need work that calls to us. Work that makes the scales irrelevant.
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