Now, step back: who here wants to say any variant of "That isn't the same thing!", "That isn't possible!", or "You are insufficiently dedicated and will never b

Now, step back: who here wants to say any variant of "That isn't the same thing!", "That isn't possible!", or "You are insufficiently dedicated and will never be truly successful!" I will. Your second and third obections are straw men, but the first sounds reasonable to me. I don't see a modestly demanding side-project from a day job (to use your terms) as quite the same thing as what the quotes in the OP are about. You make a good point about some patterns being socially constructed. That could be a factor here, and an interesting one. But I think you spoil it by excessively extrapolating from your own situation. This is a more subtle question than that. The startup I'm working on occupies the bulk of my life right now (I'm not sure I'd say "taken over", since it's a far from hostile occupation). I can't imagine doing what I'm doing in an arm's-length or part-time way, or even a full-time way in the 8-hours-a-day sense. It requires more creative energy and focus than anything I've worked on in the past. I can't turn that on and off. To try to fit it into a conventional rhythm would kill it. Certainly this has its downsides. But the conventional definitions of "balance" have their downsides too. The vast majority of people I observe whose lives are "balanced" by those definitions are simply not doing anything very ambitious or creative. Of course I'm not advocating imbalance as an alternative as such, but I do say that any real discussion of this question needs to take this fact into account. Most don't. (Find me one!) Most utter platitudes about "work-life balance" and stop there. As an aside, listening to Tony Hsieh yesterday made a lightbulb go on about why I find the phrase "work-life balance" so... debasing. It's because it assumes that work is not life.