My parents were teachers and I remember them marking after school and some weekends. My wife is now a teacher and she has after school meetings at least once a week, spends hours marking every night and weekends, plus a lot of her holiday preparing new lessons and admin. Contractually she has the exact same hours and holidays my parents had but her life is nothing like theirs.

Same experience here. This was in the middle of Africa yet students will have to be graded and life has to go on.

Now this seems to have been pushed back to an ever receding horizon and people work long long hours competing to get the next grant or next placement, to keep their heads above water right up till retirement.

In the U.S. academia is not that competitive after tenure (most of the time). Of course, you may have a drive to have students, which may drive you to acquire grants and so on.

I guess its anecdotal but I see the same sort of things amongst my friends in tech and pharma.

My experience in tech has been an upward increase in work load with increase in experience. Funnily enough this has been correlated with greater freedom. The less freedom I had, the more I was inclined to put in my 8 hours and check out. Now, the more the freedom that I have, the more I realize that I am always on and I have to force myself to switch off and do other things.