"High pay is highly rewarding," Kolbert writes, and in a winner-take-all economy, we're motivated to put in extra-long hours to, well, win.
We trade time for money. If you enjoy your work, and someone is willing to give you a large sum of money for your time, then working long hours makes sense... but only if you couldn't be doing something that you'd like even more than money with that time. For example, a reasonably high level executive position might pay you $250k/year for 20 years - so $5m - but it'd take you away from your family doing business travelling for 2 weeks out of every month. Would you trade a total of 10 years away from your family for $5m? Some people would. I wouldn't.
A lot of the time it's not particularly a fair trade, either.
Salaried employees can typically be forced to work upwards of the 40 hours they are officially bartering with for money. The money doesn't scale with time or effort put in, which is one of the contributing causes to burnout and do-nothing-but-still-so-"busy"-ism.
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"High pay is highly rewarding," Kolbert writes, and in a winner-take-all economy, we're motivated to put in extra-long hours to, well, win.
We trade time for money. If you enjoy your work, and someone is willing to give you a large sum of money for your time, then working long hours makes sense... but only if you couldn't be doing something that you'd like even more than money with that time. For example, a reasonably high level executive position might pay you $250k/year for 20 years - so $5m - but it'd take you away from your family doing business travelling for 2 weeks out of every month. Would you trade a total of 10 years away from your family for $5m? Some people would. I wouldn't.
A lot of the time it's not particularly a fair trade, either.
Salaried employees can typically be forced to work upwards of the 40 hours they are officially bartering with for money. The money doesn't scale with time or effort put in, which is one of the contributing causes to burnout and do-nothing-but-still-so-"busy"-ism.