This is not really true though, 40 hour working weeks are very much not something western countries "have" in the general sense of having a constitution or poli

This is not really true though, 40 hour working weeks are very much not something western countries "have" in the general sense of having a constitution or police force. In many western countries, especially northern Europe, it is a given that parents (especially women, but also men) work less than 40 hours, even in demanding jobs. As a more general example, the municipalities of many cities in the Netherlands consider 36 hours a full time job, in the sense that getting paid more than 36 hours is actually beyond your contract and working that long is very unlikely to happen. Personally I work a demanding tech job with 32 hours a week, like others in this thread, this does not hurt my performance. The real problem, and reason I suspect you use the word "have", is that this is fundamentally a cultural issue where the resolution is not for "the bad companies to stop demanding all this work" but actually the entire society moving away from the idea that work is somehow the only way to constructively spend your time, and for money being the only value that is worth pursuing. Concretely what this means is that the fetishization of work must stop. This includes hustle culture, the idea of "side" or "passive" income, and the glorification of high salaries and high work "ethic" (see the use of the word ethic there, super interesting right). Opening hackernews itself, you can see that this mindset is widespread and actually not enforced by companies. If you look around the world, you will see that many societies don't work this way. Western societies became like this, for better or worse, through religion, specifically protestant christianity. If we look back now, saying that this is a good or bad thing is complete nonsense, but looking at the present we can desire for things to be different, and that desire is what is missing.