what matters is a balancing act. Extraordinary results require focused
attention and time. Time on one thing means time away from another.
This makes balance impossible.
THE GENESIS OF A MYTH
Historically, balancing our lives is a novel privilege to even consider.
For thousands of years, work was life. If you didn’t work—hunt
game, harvest crops, or raise livestock—you didn’t live long. But
things changed. Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns,
Germs, and Steel: The Pates of Human Societies illustrates how farm-
based societies that generated a surplus of food ultimately gave rise to
professional specialization. “Twelve thousand years ago, everybody
on earth was a hunter-gatherer; now almost all of us are farmers or
else are fed by farmers.” This freedom from having to forage or farm
allowed people to become scholars and craftsmen. Some worked to
put food on our tables while others built the tables.
At first, most people worked according to their needs and
ambitions. The blacksmith didn’t have to stay at the forge until 5
p.m.; he could go home when the horse’s feet were shod. Then 19th-
century industrialization saw for the first time large numbers working
for someone else. The story became one of hard-driving bosses, year-
round work schedules, and lighted factories that ignored dawn and
dusk. Consequently, the 20th century witnessed the start of significant
grassroots movements to protect workers and limit work hours.
Still, the term “work-life balance” wasn’t coined until the mid-
1980s when more than half of all married women joined the
workforce. To paraphrase Ralph E. Gomory’s preface in the 2005
book Being Together, Working Apart: Dual-Career Families and the
Work-Life Balance, we went from a family unit with a breadwinner
and a homemaker to one with two breadwinners and no homemaker.
Anyone with a pulse knows who got stuck with the extra work in the
beginning. However, by the ’90s “work-life balance” had quickly