The line, often attributed to Dolly Parton, has the ring of a bumper sticker: easy to nod at, easy to ignore an hour later when the inbox fills up again. Do not get so busy making a living that you forget to have a life. It sounds like the kind of thing you agree with and then do nothing about. Yet two separate strands of research give it far more weight than a slogan usually earns. One shows that people who lean toward time rather than money are measurably happier. The other shows that overwork can quite literally shorten a life. Put together, they turn a nice sentiment into something worth taking seriously, though not without a few honest qualifications.
The people who choose time are happier
Begin with the happiness side, because the evidence is clearer than you might expect. The behavioral scientist Ashley Whillans and her colleagues have spent years studying whether people prioritize time or money, and what follows from that preference. In a preregistered study that followed around a thousand graduating students, those who valued time over money went on to choose more intrinsically rewarding activities and were happier a year later, an effect that held even after accounting for how much money they actually had.
That last detail matters, because it rules out the easy objection that only the wealthy can afford to value time. The orientation predicts greater wellbeing across students, ordinary working adults and representative samples, and it is linked to investing more in relationships and daily social life rather than less. Having a life, in other words, the time for people, rest and things that matter for their own sake, tracks happiness more reliably than the extra earning does. The people who guard their hours are not being frivolous. On average, they are being wise.
The Artful Age
A weekly letter on aging well, family across generations, and the creative life after the kids leave home.
Overwork has a body count
The other strand is bleaker and more literal. The phrase making a living contains a grim irony, because past a certain point the making can cost the living. In 2021 the World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization published the largest study of its kind on the subject. They estimated that working 55 or more hours a week is associated with a 35 percent higher risk of stroke and a 17 percent higher risk of dying from heart disease compared with a 35 to 40 hour week, and that long working hours contributed to some 745,000 deaths in a single year.
This is the sentence at its most concrete. Forgetting to have a life is usually a slow, private erosion, but at the extreme it becomes a medical fact with a number attached. The body keeps its own ledger, and it does not accept overtime indefinitely.
Why the trade is so easy to get wrong
If the case is this clear, why do so many of us drift into the wrong side of it? Largely because the pull toward work is stronger and better organized than the pull toward everything else. A raise, a promotion, a longer client list are legible and immediate; you can see them, measure them, put them on a form. The value of an unhurried evening or a long friendship is real but diffuse, and it is always easy to postpone by one more week. Add the fact that the glow of extra income fades as we adjust to it, while the hours we traded away do not come back, and you have a quiet, structural bias toward overwork. Drifting into it is not a moral failing. It is the path of least resistance, which is exactly why the reminder has to be said out loud.
The honest caveats
Two qualifications keep this from becoming smug. The first, and most important, is that this is far easier counsel for people who have a choice. For a great many, long hours are not vanity or a planning error but necessity, driven by low wages, insecure work, several jobs, or people at home who depend on them. Telling someone working two jobs to keep to save the rent that they should slow down and smell the roses is not wisdom; it is blindness to their situation. The slogan speaks to those with genuine room to choose, and it should be offered in that spirit rather than as a scold. The second caveat is that the neat split between making a living and having a life is too clean. For many people work is not merely a means but a real part of a good life, a source of meaning, identity, friendship and the satisfaction of doing something well, so having a life does not automatically mean working less. Balance is individual, and some people thrive on intense stretches of work by choice. The point is not that ambition is a mistake, only that beyond meeting genuine needs, trading ever more time for money carries steep costs that are easy not to see until later.
Where it leaves us
For those with the choice, then, the old line holds up better than most. The evidence suggests that time spent on relationships, rest and things that matter does more for a life than the marginal raise, and that at the far end overwork can cut the life short outright. The practical move is small: treat time as the scarcer currency it actually is, protect the hours that make the living worth doing, and check now and then whether the effort of making a living has quietly begun to consume the life it was supposed to pay for. Held with its caveats, the sentiment is less a platitude than a course correction, and most of us need it at least once.