If I had an eraser that could magically scrub away any common phrase from our collective minds, I’d use it to delete a phrase that’s become so overused it has started to lose any real meaning: work-life balance.

It’s a relatively modern expression, coined somewhere around the 1970s when we properly started to think out loud about how to name the natural see-saw between the hours we spend toiling away at work versus the hours we spend doing everything else that life involves.

Work-life balance may sound like a relatively innocuous term, but I have some major gripes with it.Credit: Ryan Osland.

For most of history, humans have viewed work in a pretty negative way. The Ancient Greeks’ word for work, ponos, roughly translates as sorrow or hardship. The Romans viewed work the same, heaping inequality onto the pile as lower-class slaves performed arduous work so that others could enjoy their leisure.

In the Middle Ages, work was primarily a way to gain food, and then the First Industrial Revolution in the mid-18th century increased our output and........

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