It's Sunday evening, around seven, and you can feel it arrive.
The weekend's been good. You slept in, you saw friends, you went for a long walk. And now, with the light going, a heaviness settles in your chest like weather rolling in off the sea. Tomorrow's Monday. The inbox, the meetings, the commute, the version of you that shows up for all of it. You catch yourself calculating how many weeks until the next holiday. Then how many years until you can stop altogether.
Somewhere in that calculation is a quiet, sad assumption you've probably never looked at directly: that the real part of your life is the part that happens when you're not working.
Is work-life balance a myth?
The idea behind work-life balance often is. It assumes work is something you endure to pay for life, and that life begins when work ends. But when your work becomes an expression of who you are, the split dissolves. The question stops being how to balance them and becomes how to live one whole life.
That's not a slogan about loving your job. It's a different starting point, and it changes what you look for.
Why do we need balance in the first place?
Because we've been taught to see work as the opposite of life.
The common belief goes something like this. Work is what you have to do to put food on the table and pay for the things and experiences you want. It's something you'd otherwise not be doing. Life happens after the work is done, in the evenings, at weekends, on holiday, and one day, finally, in retirement.
Start from that premise and you'll spend your whole career trying to protect the small part of your week that feels like yours from the large part that doesn't. You'll count down to Fridays. You'll save your joy for later. And it's worth noticing how much of your one life that postpones.
Think of a photograph left in a sunny window. Every year, a little more of the original colour fades. A life spent waiting for the weekend, and then for retirement, is a bit like that. Nothing dramatic happens on any given Monday. But over years, the person who was going to enjoy life later quietly fades.
What if work didn't feel like work?
Here's the question I'd like you to sit with. What if your work was an expression of your inner self? What if it came from a deep desire of your own? What if, in your work, you found joy, satisfaction, contribution and meaning, and felt a real drive to keep showing up for others, and through them, for yourself?
What would happen to work-life balance then?
For one thing, you wouldn't have to wait for your working hours to end before life could start. You wouldn't have to wait for old age to enjoy your freedom. Your life would simply be life, all of it, worth living.
I know that can sound like a luxury. For many people it feels impossibly far away. But notice that you already know the difference in your body. There have been days, even in jobs you didn't love, when time disappeared because you were absorbed in something that mattered to you. That feeling is the thread. It's what work feels like when it's yours.
It's also worth noticing what the Sunday dread is really made of. Often it isn't the tasks themselves. It's the feeling of having to become someone else for five days: more guarded, more polished, less yourself. The heaviness isn't the workload. It's the costume you put on at the office door. When people stop having to perform at work, many of them find that even ordinary jobs become lighter, because they're no longer spending half their energy being someone they're not.
Doesn't loving your work just make you a workaholic?
It can look that way from outside. Watched from a distance, I'd probably be called a workaholic, given the hours I put into what I do. But my body knows exactly when it's time to go back to my family, to rest, to switch off and be out in nature. In between, my work moves me. It feeds me energy. It inspires me at my core.
That's the difference that matters. A workaholic is usually running from something: a feeling, a fear, a home that feels harder than the office. Their work is an escape, and the long hours are a way of not stopping. Someone doing work that expresses who they are is running toward something. They rest easily because nothing is chasing them.
So the balance I care about isn't hours in versus hours out. You're out of balance any time you sacrifice your freedom in order to work, and any time you sacrifice meaningful work in order to feel free. Both are the same split, seen from different sides.
Balance, in the way I mean it, is a feeling rather than a timetable. It's the sense that the whole of your life belongs to you. You work hard when the work calls for it, you rest deeply when rest calls for it, and neither one feels like a sacrifice made on behalf of the other.
How can I tell what kind of work is really mine?
Here's a practice that takes about ten minutes and a pen. It's based on a question I've been asking people for years.
Imagine for a moment that money is no longer an issue. Not that you're rich, just that you'll be looked after, whatever you choose. You don't have to work at all. Now ask yourself: what would I actually do with my time? What would I keep doing even if nobody paid me?
Write down whatever comes, without judging it. Then look at the list and circle anything that involves other people, or making something, or solving something. Those are usually the clues.
Finally, take your current work and ask: is any of that already here, even a little? For most people, the answer is yes. Sometimes the work you're in contains a seed of the work that's yours. Sometimes it doesn't, and that's useful to know too.
What if I can't change my work right now?
Then start with what you're carrying into it.
Many people can't change jobs tomorrow, and I'd never suggest anyone leave financial security on a whim. But a great deal of the Sunday dread doesn't come from the work itself. It comes from the version of you that shows up for it: the one bracing against criticism, pleasing everyone, proving something, putting pressure on itself at every step. When that version eases, the same job often feels completely different, and options appear that weren't visible before.
On our stories page, Erin Kurt wrote: "My business literally tripled within 6 months." I don't quote that as a promise about anyone's income. I quote it because it's what can happen when someone stops fighting their own work and starts expressing themselves through it. Work done from that place tends to flourish, and the person doing it tends to flourish with it.
If the sense that something's missing goes deeper than the job, feeling stuck despite success may speak more closely to where you are.
Where do I start?
With one clear conversation about what you actually want from your working life.
Sara, our veteran RS Method Master Coach, holds free mentoring sessions for exactly this. No pitch. Just a calm, clear look at what's underneath the Sunday evening feeling, and what might be possible if work and life stopped being enemies.
Perhaps we don't need better balance. Perhaps we need a new relationship with work in the first place.
Robert Simic, guiding the remembering.