It’s 11:00 PM, my phone screen lights up and the subject line is harmless “Quick question for tomorrow”, but my body reacts as if it’s an alarm: heart rate up, shoulders tense, mind snapping back to work.
I don’t answer, but I also don’t really stay off. I hover in that grey zone where so many of us now live: not actually working, not truly resting, just… available.
We call this a “work life balance problem”, but the phrase is too tidy for what’s happening. Globally, only about one third of employees say they’re thriving in life; the rest describe themselves as struggling or outright suffering.
The numbers are blunt.
A joint study by the World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization estimated that working 55 hours or more per week was linked to 745,000 deaths from heart disease and stroke in 2016 which a rise of almost 30% compared with 2000. Long hours are no longer just a brag on LinkedIn; they’re an occupational hazard in the same category as toxic fumes and dangerous machinery.
And it isn’t only about the hours on the clock, it’s the hours we never quite leave. In a Eurofound survey of employees in Belgium, France, Italy and Spain, over 80% said they receive work-related messages outside their contractual working time in a typical week. Almost nine in ten reply to at least some of them, so it seems like we’ve exported the office into our pockets and then wondered why our brains feel like open browser tabs we can’t close.
Across the world, Gallup’s latest data show roughly 58% of employees are “struggling” with their lives and only 33% say they are thriving. That language is important: not “lazy,” not “unmotivated” but struggling. People are pushing hard as the system is simply not designed for them to arrive anywhere.
Additionally, in 2022, the average worker across OECD countries logged about 1,752 hours a year. In South Korea, it was 1,901 hours – nearly a full extra month of work, 149 hours above that OECD average. You don’t need to be an economist to guess what gets squeezed when a month of someone’s life is handed over to the office: sleep, friendships, parenting, activism, art, daydreaming … all the things that make a life feel like yours.
Yet something interesting is happening beneath the exhaustion. When you look closely at the debates around four-day weeks, “right to disconnect” laws, or hybrid work, you can sense a cultural refusal forming. People are starting to treat balance not as a perk, but as infrastructure, as basic to a functioning society as clean water or public transport. If work can reach into every room of our lives, then it’s reasonable for life to knock on the office door and ask for its time back.
Personally, I think about balance less as a perfect middle and more as a rhythm. There are seasons when we lean into work like a new project, a crisis, a launch, and seasons when we consciously lean out and let other identities take the lead: friend, parent, citizen, lover, neighbour, artist, simply a person who sleeps eight hours and doesn’t apologise for it. The real danger is not intensity; it’s permanence. When every season is peak season, the field eventually dies.
So the question isn’t “Can we afford work–life balance?” The question is: what kind of economy are we building if we don’t? One where millions are technically employed but emotionally absent; where burnout is normalised; where preventable illnesses quietly pile up in the background statistics of public health reports.
The alternative is less dramatic and more radical than it sounds: clearer boundaries, saner hours, devices that sometimes stay dark, managers trained to care about output rather than permanent availability, policies that recognise humans as more than their job titles. None of this will bring my 10:47 p.m. email back into its time slot. But it might mean that one day, when the phone lights up, it’s a message I can happily ignore until morning without being eaten by guilt.