Even the longest economic expansion in history cannot continue forever. And when it ends, what will happen to the smaller revolutions it has created? To the transformation of the office into a place where workers are acknowledged to have families? To the growing insistence of employees that their lives matter? Is all this talk of work-life balance really a change to the social core, or is it just cocktail conversation that will fade when the party's over?
—Lisa Belkin, "Life's Work," The New York Times, March 29, 2000
Yet, some managers demean even the idea of vacation respites. "When I am not at work, I think about work," one executive revealed in an interview.
I know a lot of managers who would be proud to utter something like that for the record.
Dick Leider doubts that this is a healthy attitude. A Minneapolis consultant and author, Dick paints a picture of managers struggling to capture a mythical thing called "balance" — a proportioning of their lives with sufficient weight on professional activities, but with a healthy counterweight of family and personal interests.
"It used to be that work-and-life balance was a boutique issue," he says. "You know, something that would be great to worry about whenever — and if — one had some free time. But imbalance is killing people!"
—Tom Brown, "Time to diversify your 'life portfolio'?," Industry Week, November 10, 1986
Words and phrases commonly act as cultural signposts that give us clues about where we are and where we're going. The phrase "work-life balance" is a perfect example. Coined in 1986, its usage in the mainstream press was sporadic for many years. For example, the Lexis-Nexis database of major newspapers (the top 50 U.S. papers and another 20 or so top papers from around the world) lists about 25 articles that use this phrase from 1986 through to the end of 1996. The number then increases steadily: 31 in 1997; 58 in 1998; 116 in 1999.
However, we're only eight months into 2000, and there have already been about 200 articles that use this phrase.
[Update: There were, in all, 451 articles that used the phrase in 2000. In 2001, the number jumped to 535. In 2002, there have been 423 articles as of October 17.]
If the notion that newspapers reflect our lives isn't too quaint (and I don't believe it is), then this roughly geometric increase must reflect something interesting that's bubbled up from the depths of the cultural stew. Consider, too, some of the words in today's "See Also" list: downshifter, inconspicuous consumption, rejecter, voluntary simplicity. Clearly the idea that our technologically hopped-up society is going too fast for some people — and not just for the usual cast of Luddites, either — is taking hold at some level.
