Alexis Ohanian says you'll never achieve a perfect work-life balance. He's right.

• Alexis Ohanian recently told Entrepreneur he doesn't think anyone can accomplish work-life balance.
• He's right. It's never going to be 50/50, and you'll probably burn out trying to make it that way.
• Ohanian preaches the importance of routine, but also the "surprise and delight" factor.

In a recent interview with Entrepreneur, Alexis Ohanian said he doesn't think anyone can accomplish work-life balance.

The "reality," Ohanian explained, is that it's "never 50/50" when it comes to splitting your time between your professional life and your home life. "You'll never achieve anywhere close to that — nor should you," he said.

As I scrolled through endless TikToks glamorizing rigorous pre- and post-work daily routines, seemingly meant to "optimize" a person's waking hours towards achieving that balance (apparently at the expense of a functional-human amount of sleep), I thought about Ohanian's perspective. It seems like a perfect counterpoint to all those influencers who are trying to convince us that you can do it all, perfectly, all the time, if only you structure your waking hours well enough.

Ohanian's point is that sometimes, work needs to be the priority — and other times, life needs to be. Maybe that's the key to not caring so much about your job that you burn out, while also not caring quite so little that you're dissatisfied with your career. Every day, you care a bit more or a bit less, and that ebb and flow complements the stressors and joys of your home life.

"There are times in your life where you will need to focus on the career, the work," Ohanian said. "There are times in your life when you need to focus on life. It's on a spectrum that's ever-flowing back and forth."

Ohanian, a cofounder of Reddit, husband of tennis superstar Serena Williams, and soon-to-be father of two, also preached the importance of the "discipline of routines" (for him, it's a cold plunge in an ice tank first thing in the morning and a strict 6 p.m. nightly dinner with his family) and its opposite: the power of "surprise and delight," a marketing technique in spontaneity used by companies that Ohanian also employs in his personal life.

"If your default state has this kind of routine and expectations to it, then you also create the opportunity to do stuff that feels out of the ordinary and different," he said.

We've heard plenty from millionaires and billionaires about the importance of routines. On a smaller, less business-y scale, legions of TikTokers seem to concur: Routines — whether they're "low-dopamine mornings" or an aggressively efficient "5 to 9" action plan — are the way to hack your life.

So it's refreshing to hear Ohanian explicitly lay out that while routines and consistency are important, flexibility is also essential.