In 1994, Jeff Bezos sat in a converted garage in Bellevue, Washington, surrounded by extension cords and three Sun workstations. He was thirty years old, had walked away from a senior vice presidency at D.E. Shaw, and was working sixteen hours a day to build a bookstore that didn't yet have a customer. When his first employees joined, he famously told them they could work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon, they couldn't choose two out of three. He wasn't looking for balance; he was looking for a specific type of asymmetric obsession. The result was a company that now controls nearly 40% of the US e-commerce market.

The term "work-life balance" first appeared in the UK in the late 1970s and migrated to the United States by 1986. It was originally a response to the "hustle culture" of the eighties, designed to protect the mental health of the corporate middle class. Today, it has morphed into a $4.5 trillion global wellness industry that promises a harmonious equilibrium between professional output and personal peace. This promise is a sedative for the mediocre. It suggests that greatness can be achieved through a series of neatly partitioned eight-hour blocks.