Originally Posted by Bostonian
If one career pays (say) five times as much as another but requires twice the hours (80 vs. 40 per week), some people, especially males, will choose the former. They can in theory retire early and enjoy more leisure in their 40s and 50s. The start-up dream is to solve your lifetime financial problem with a few "insane" years of intense work.

IMO, this is something of a fantasy. The kind of person who knowingly signs up to work 80+ hours per week is doing it for the rush and the money. In most cases, he isn't suddenly going to transform into a dude of leisure.

Plus, there are other very real factors. People get used to or stuck in a certain income level (read: children, mortgage payment, and/or divorce). They look around themselves and see everyone else working umpteen hours and know that they have to keep the pace or risk losing their jobs. We all know how quickly people can become obsolete and unhirable. Not to mention how pointless a lot of that kind of financial consulting work is, anyway. Full of sound and fury....

It's the same way in academia. People work themselves to the bone for tenure and say that things will be different afterward. But things stay the same. That newly minted Associate Prof. still has to publish in order to get the next grant. If she doesn't, the university may not fire her, but it also won't give her money for research. So she gets to teach or work in the clinic if she's an MD. People who want to do research rarely want to do that. If they did, they would have signed up to work a community college or a local hospital way back when. So they suck it up and keep cranking out papers (many of which are mediocre at best).

Plus, many of these people also enjoy heart disease, high levels of stress, divorce, and the constant knowledge that they may outsourced.

And meanwhile, we're cutting our national investments in R&D. So our bad situation is now getting to be like a bad air day in Beijing: Crazy Bad.

So put me in the camp that says, "Yep, this is insane."