I bet people like that drift into voluntary unpaid overtime.
When someone makes $500k+, what does "unpaid overtime" even mean?
In fact, it will make it worse, because you’ll keep telling yourself to hold on for the money while your mental health exponentially deteriorates.
A lot of people at hedge funds like having a baseline level of good stress in their lives. It's only when the stress starts to make you feel insecure that it creates problems.
I worked at one of these firms for a while, and my "burnout" point came when I realized I wasn't actually getting rewarded for my extra contributions to the company (my bonuses were going up by a small amount each quarter, no matter what).
https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/adult-health/in... https://www.helpguide.org/articles/stress/burnout-prevention...
People get addicted to the dopamine hits of getting things done and when they hit a wall, enter a vicious cycle of depressive withdrawal. Recovering from burnout by taking a break is simply resetting that dopamine addiction. Just a personal theory.
If you work in a high paced environment with competent colleagues, management and tooling, you can just keep rolling with the punches and never hit the wall.
It means shit work/life balance, thus missing on a lot of people that would want to have it and results in worse productivity (people need time off or they break).
Solution: take a job that doesn't pay $500k.
I hate this saying and rarely say it, but "you can't have your cake and eat it too"
No one should take a $500k job and expect the culture to be 9-5, clock in clock out.
It takes most people 10+ years to earn $500k (often still working their asses off overtime). $500k is a shit ton of money.
Drift? I think you mean Sprint.