Work hard, play slightly harder

The work/life balance isn’t either/or, it's now both

Credit: Eduardo Ramos

For years, the very dull chart below was quite interesting.

Definitions of interesting vary. At the very least, it became more interesting when we added another line to it:

This chart tells a great story. Although the absolute importance of leisure didn’t change much across the 20-year span, the relative importance of it, compared to work, absolutely did.

In 1990, the first time the World Values Survey asked the question, slightly more people described ‘work’ as important to them (49%) than said the same for ‘leisure’ (44%). By the end of the 1990s, the positions had reversed. Now leisure was slightly ahead of work. By 2009 the gap had grown wider: while leisure maintained its level, work dropped, hitting 38% in 2005 before recovering a little to 42% during the start of the global financial crisis.

Then the trend got even wider. Trajectory started asking the same questions in 2011, and found the chasm between the importance of work and the importance of leisure was yawning:

There’s a number of essential insights that emerge from these data.

Firstly, since the 1990s, leisure has consistently been ranked more highly than work in our collective minds. Where once we might have defined ourselves by our jobs or professions, now our leisure choices are more fundamental to who we think we are.

In 2018, when we asked about both work and leisure as well as family, friends, art/culture, national identity, affluence and politics, only ‘family’ was seen as ‘very important’ by more people. ‘Friends’ also scored 48% - the same as leisure.

This centrality of leisure is a cornerstone of a macrotrend we call the Play Society. We have a seemingly insatiable appetite for leisure in its many, varied and ever-changing forms.

However – and here’s the second essential insight – leisure isn’t invulnerable. We can and do deprioritise it when needed. When times get tough, we get thrifty. This is evident in the long tail of the global financial crisis (2011-2013) and in 2015 (the data this year was collected in the immediate aftermath of the Paris terror attacks).

The third essential insight from this is the astonishing collapse in the importance of work. The hierarchy in 1990 was quite straightforward: family first, work second and then entertainment third.

By 2018 the hierarchy was family first, leisure and friends second, then national identity, affluence and, in sixth place, work. Work is ahead of politics and art – but very much a lower priority.

This was a story we told in trends decks, insight reports and keynotes for years. Leisure is getting more important and work less so. The era of work/life balance is here. The appetite for experiences, for leisure, for travel, for socialising is huge.

Depending on the organisation or sector, the implications of this were enormous. For travel and tourism it was about understanding trip portfolios and profiles, last minute bookings, discovery channels and premiumisation. For in-home it was about digital and connectivity – bringing the outside in elevating the night in front of the TV. For hospitality it was about understanding new venue types and destinations, leaning into the serendipity and spontaneity of going out out, surviving periods of economic constraint and tapping the signs that read: ‘leisure always recovers’ and ‘there’s nothing people enjoy more than out-of-home leisure’.

But then… the pandemic, and a cost of living crisis that still dominates our consumer issues tracker. The story above is still all true, except for one component – work isn’t in the doldrums anymore.

The chart above adds the years 2020-2025 to the pre-pandemic, Trajectory-collected data. It also takes the story in a different direction.

Leisure importance faltered, as it always does when times are tough. In fact, it faltered more than ever – reaching 31% in 2023, just a few percentage points ahead of work – and the closest we’d ever measured the two indicators. But since then, the leisure metric has recovered, as it always does. In 2025, 44% of UK consumers said that leisure was very important to them: right in the middle of the 35 year range.

But another thing has been happening at the same time, something that hadn’t happened at any point before: work is recovering. In 2025 36% of people described work as very important to them – nearly twice the proportion of a decade earlier. Based on the most recent data, the work life balance isn’t an either/or - it’s both.

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What does this mean?

Alongside work getting more important to us, it’s also been getting… better.

This is perhaps a bit counterintuitive, but if we think about it, it makes some sense.

On one hand, in a cost of living crisis and with unemployment creeping upwards, work might be gathering extra importance purely because it feels so necessary.

In a less utilitarian sense, work might also be legitimately better. Pay is increasing across the board, and the national living wage has increased by around a third since 2021 (and the threshold for earning it has dropped from 25 to 21).

The biggest improvements in working sentiment have come since the pandemic, and it seems likely that the shifts in work as a result of the adaptations we made during lockdown are contributors. For the most part, people are back in the workplace at least some of the time but many have more time working from home than they used to. The way lockdown universally normalised video calling as an in-person. meeting alternative means that travel for business is down. More of our time is ours to control. We like that.

There might even be an AI angle to this. The chatter is that AI is bad news for jobs, in that it’s going to make them obsolete. As I’ve explored before in these pixels, that’s nonsense. It’s also possible that AI is improving our jobs because it’s automating the drudgery. Another possibility is that AI – simply getting to use these tools – is rewarding and fun in and of itself. Maybe we’re enjoying that fact that our work – some work – lets us be part of the future.

Another implication from all of this is that the strength of the Play Society might well wane if work’s ascendance continues. The trend was never about leisure getting more important to us in absolute terms – the line is flat, after all – but about it being more important in relative terms.

We aren’t going to stop prioritising leisure or carving out time for it. But the work side of the work life balance equation is apparently offering its first serious challenge in decades.

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What now?

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