I agree. None of those people you’ve mentioned would recognize the concept of “work-life balance” at all. If you want to be exceptional at something then there’

I agree. None of those people you’ve mentioned would recognize the concept of “work-life balance” at all. If you want to be exceptional at something then there’s no substitute for putting more effort in. In fact, if you look at Google books ngram viewer [1] or Google search trends [2] you’ll find the term is a very modern one. I think there are lots of ways to live a fulfilling life. Relaxing and not worrying about being exceptional is one of them, but it feels to me like there’s a trend towards demonizing hard work (whether at $dayjob or in personal pursuits) which doesn’t seem healthy. [1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=work-life+balance&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=work-life+bala... [2] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=work%20life%20balance&hl=en https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=work%20l...