You're absolutely right, but I'd argue that, by switching to a more balanced life-style, you're still optimizing your life... except instead of optimizing for m

You're absolutely right, but I'd argue that, by switching to a more balanced life-style, you're still optimizing your life... except instead of optimizing for money-earned by your company, you're maximizing for personal health and satisfaction. And really it's this question of "what are we optimizing for?" (aka "what's do I want to do in my life?") that explains why we buy into the culture of overwork. As in, if your goal in life is to maximize company and personal profit per time, then by all means, committing to an over kill culture will get you there. If you want to party hard (and I mean hard as in hookers and cocaine in a pent house, not a weekend camping trip to Yosemite or whatever), you will need to work hard. On the other hand, if your goal in life is to live long and healthy and or get really good at your craft, then it makes sense to limit your daily hours and be patient. If you don't know what your life goals are (and I imagine a lot of young folks are in this category), then you'll readily buy into whatever life-goals are presented to you by whoever person has the most social influence. And the young guys who flaunt the tons of money they have made in a short amount of time through overworking really hard influence us a lot more than the old guys who intentionally don't mention the large sum of money they've made working slowly over time. So we model our lives after those fast burners, and try to replicate their success despite having a different set of physical resources to work with. This (lack thereof) personal life strategy will work for a tiny population of the folks who adopt it, and having known only success, they will have some level of contempt for the large majority who couldn't do it. As for the large majority who fail, they'll either figure out how to be patient and lead a balanced life (like the writer of this blog), or wind up with some sort of kidney disease in their 30s. And that's really just life when you throw out all the frivolous junk of "optimized load times", "brand adherence", "platform agnosticism", "shipping deadlines", etc., it is about finding out what for yourself what you can and what you're going to optimize for in your short several decades on this relatively eternal planet.