The initial way that I solved it was periodic, extended sabbaticals (the first one was 15 mos, but that's obviously a little extreme: I like taking 4-6 mos off

The initial way that I solved it was periodic, extended sabbaticals (the first one was 15 mos, but that's obviously a little extreme: I like taking 4-6 mos off between jobs). Since then, I've moved to smaller companies that are more conducive to healthier work schedules. I gather that the marginal sale of an hour of labor isn't perfectly efficient, but fundamentally you are still selling hours of labor and there should be some point between 0 and 40 that an employer would want to buy for some value between 0 and $[full salary]. If you can imagine making 20% less without being horribly financially insecure, then trading that top 20% for something that you consider worth it should be doable. This is obviously more feasible with smaller companies, where the cost of managing custom employee contracts isn't infeasible and they're able to be more pragmatic about win-win situations. My current employer is getting someone of my skills for a steal, even if I'm not working a full 40, and I'm getting a work environment that's more than worth the lost salary. In my current job, I make about 35% less than I did in my last job (incl. expected value of equity). This is probably an outlier due to various details of my career. But it's illustrative of how much I'm willing to walk the talk, since I was very clear on the reasons for the switch and decided that they were worth the cost to me. I'm not suggesting that everyone has a magical dream job waiting for them at the perfect point on the salary/quality-of-life spectrum. I'm just saying that, at least among all the people I know, it's a lot more in your hands than a lot of people realize (with the caveat reiterated that some industries are just too slow and dumb collectively to treat workers as anything but inflexible cogs.