Work-Life Balance Is Making a Comeback

Don’t ask me how, but I ended up on Google Trends looking at searches for “work-life balance.”

And to my surprise — and honestly, my sadness — it’s hotter than ever.

I thought this term was on the way out.

I thought we’d collectively realized it was a myth. A corporate bedtime story meant to soothe the “why can’t I breathe?” feeling that comes from career, caregiving, and self-care all colliding at once.

Apparently not.

So if we’re going to keep talking about work-life balance, I think we need to get honest about something first: Whose job is it to protect it?

At first, I thought: both.

If your boss emails at 8:47pm with “quick questions,” that’s not exactly encouraging balance.

And if you’re hell bent on making every Slack channel as read during dinner, that part is on you.

But the problem with both - and any decent project manager will agree - is: you can’t have more than one party truly accountable for the same thing.

So then I moved the responsibility up to the organization.

Companies set the rules.
They decide what “urgent” means.
They decide how much work is normal - and how much space is left for the rest of life.

But then the part of my brain that remembers my two business school degrees and time at McKinsey kicked in…

The primary job of a company is to optimize shareholder return.

And telling people to log off early to make dinner, rest, or pick up a sick kid doesn’t neatly map to how we measure success.

Stock prices don’t track family dinners.
Profit margins don’t reward rest.
Burnout rates doesn’t show up on quarterly earnings calls.

And those metrics aren’t changing anytime soon!

Which means we can’t realistically expect companies at scale to protect work-life balance for us.

And that’s where I ultimately land, which is: It’s on us.

Not in the empowerment seminar “set better boundaries and manifest the life you want” way.

But in the deeply unsexy, ongoing work of choosing what we will and won’t optimize for.

Work-life balance doesn’t get granted to us. Work-life balance gets taken by us.

We have to determine what it is for us individually and make it so - often quietly, imperfectly, and with consequences.

In practice, “taking work-life balance” looks like tradeoffs — not tricks.

It looks like:

• choosing a job that pays less but lets you be unreachable in the evenings

• saying no to roles or visibility that require constant availability

• letting go of being exceptional at everything, all the time — because capability isn’t the same as capacity

• disappointing someone every single day (sometimes your boss, sometimes the PTA, sometimes the version of you that wants gold stars)

• accepting that balance isn’t harmony — it’s constraint

Basically, it’s deciding what f*cks you’re willing to give and being okay with the fact that no one is coming to make room for all of them.

This isn’t fair.
And it’s not evenly distributed.

But waiting for companies to fix it for us keeps us stuck in the same loop: hoping relief will come from the very systems that profit from our exhaustion.

So if “work-life balance” is making a comeback, I hope the conversation evolves.

Not toward how to do it all but toward who decides what actually matters.

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Sending enoughness,

J

PS. I’m building Rule Breaker Reset—small-group coaching for working parents who are ready to drop a few “shoulds,” choose one real priority, and stop feeling behind. If you want early access, reply and I’ll add you to the waitlist.

⌲ Message Jess Weisz!