I'm young, single and without children, and even 40 hours a week feels like a tad much, even when I realistically worked 5-6 hours a day.
I can't imagine a life of 60-90 hour weeks be worth whatever carrot they dangle in front of those poor sods.
I can't imagine a life of 60-90 hour weeks be worth whatever carrot they dangle in front of those poor sods.
Drug addicts claim to spent 1000s a day on their habit. They don't, but it makes their loss and frowned upon habit seem less so, "I'd be a rich, upstanding citizen if it weren't for this one thing!", with perhaps the added causality chain of -> "this isn't a big hurdle to overcome" and -> "I can stop whenever I want to".
Same with work. Working is likely a negative experience for a lot of people, so anything that frames it to be less so, is memed. "Well this was exhausting, but I was so productive! I worked like what 80? 90? hours this week?", when in reality much of that time was typing long winded comments like this one.
The real magic of the "4 hour workweek" and similar books isn't finding the one idea that makes it possible, but to make working enjoyable. That seems to happen automatically with a shorter workweek (Kelloggs, Microsoft Japan) but you can get there with a regular job and being honest about productivity and I say that as somebody who thought it was impossible with a 40 hour workweek. I now do that and have a lot of energy to spare in the evenings.
But given this is mostly a software-centric message board, software engineering and tech in general I have not observed much correlation at all between amount of input (work) and output (profit, success, happiness, etc). The expanse is wide open, the decision-tree of ways to approach a problem is nearly infinite, and choosing an approach to go down almost always incurs an opportunity cost of solving the same problem in a much better way. I've seen this a lot with lots of founders: They are so motivated and have enormous reserves of energy to "work", and while they are legitimately "working" in a certain sense (writing code, hustling for investment, planning business strategy, etc), it's often work that functions like a greedy algorithm: Stuck in local maxima, stuck in ruts, inflexible, etc and having a very hard time pausing, reflecting, and being judicious with their time, energy and focus. I call this the "Bias of Doing Work"
Of course this assumes that the 40th-80th hours provide marginal utility (perhaps a big assumption).