Scarlett Johansson says work-life balance doesn’t exist — she believes admitting that was the first step to achieving her $165M fortune

She's also a business founder with a skincare brand, The Outset (2), and a production company, These Pictures.

And she's in a seemingly idyllic marriage with Saturday Night Live personality Colin Jost, and she has two children — one with Jost and one with her ex-husband, Romain Dauriac.

Overall, Johansson has a reported net worth of $165 million (3).

But even she admits that dividing her time equally between her work obligations and her family ones has been a challenge she has been unable to accomplish.

"I think actually admitting that there is no work-life balance is the first step to getting there in a way because it's just not possible," Johansson told CBS Sunday Morning (4). "There's always … a deficit in some area. I've learned to be more kind to myself in that way. You can't do all of these things all the time. There's just like, 'Is it good enough?'"

A lifelong lesson on work-life balance

Johansson started to come to this realization early in life, as she watched her parents struggle to pay bills. She has spoken in the past about her family relying on food stamps to get by when she was a young child.

"We were living on welfare, we were on food stamps," Johansson said in an episode of Inside the Actors Studio (5), adding that it was a strain on her parents' marriage. "My parents were raising four kids in a low-income household in Manhattan. So, it was a lot."

As an adult, she has felt the consequences of putting too much emphasis on one aspect of her life. She dated her Black Dahlia co-star Josh Hartnett for two years in the early 2000s, but the pair ultimately broke up because their schedules kept them apart (6).

Since having children, however, Johansson has paid more attention to that work-life split — but, even today, she says, she doesn't get it fully right.

"Somebody once told me, 'If you're successful as a parent like 75% of the time, that's good — if you're doing 75% of it like right, then you're winning, which is probably true," Johansson told CBS.

Work-life balance is increasingly important

Johansson is hardly the only person struggling to balance their work life and their home life.

For the first time since Gallup began evaluating the lives of U.S. workers, more workers report struggling (49%) than thriving (46%) (7). Engagement has dropped to the lowest level on record in the past decade at just 31% of engaged employees (8).

Perhaps that's why, according to the 2025 Workplace Wellness Survey by the Employee Benefit Research Institute (9), work-life balance is the top contributor to workers' sense of workplace well-being these days.