I’m not sure I entirely agree with that. While there are certainly examples (like medical residents and junior consultants) where crazy hours are somewhere between a rite of passage and a weed-out system, I can tell you that in my field (marketing and advertising), it’s common at every level.
I’ve worked with a lot of senior marketing people (such as Chief Marketing Officers at Fortune 500 companies), and they, too, routinely put in 60-80 hour weeks.
in America the people who work those hours are many times working them temporarily in exchange for a better future, or they’re obsessed with wealth and status. or they’re just highly ambitious and type A personalities.
medical residents and grad students can put in 80-100 hour weeks but they know it’s temporary. lawyers and bankers too.
by comparison in some east Asians nations there is just a culture of staying at work all day even if you don’t accomplish much.
Many are willing to put in these long hours with the hope of retiring early. At that point they can concentrate on dealing with their ulcers, high blood pressure and heart disease.
Brainwashing and social conditioning are powerful things.
In the US there is enormous social pressure to work work work work work, more and more hours. Enjoy your life? How selfish! That’s what vacations are for! - except there are people who don’t even use all their vacation time.
You do realize that tens of millions of Americans are in that very bind, don’t you?
Plenty of minimum-wage drones are doing 80 hours weeks by working two jobs and still not having enough to get by, and don’t even have a chance to accumulate wealth.
But I’ll stop this tangent here.
I don’t know why, who needs that much money so badly that you miss out on the best years of your life? It must be a specific mindset that gets you trapped in such an acquisitive situation. It can be worn as a badge of honour as well but they are welcome to it plus the relationship collapses, mental issues and health issues it often brings. I’ve worked side by side with many such people and it often ends up ugly.
I’ve always worked just enough to get done what I need to get done. 40 hour weeks maximum. I’ve been promoted and paid well because I’m good at what I do but I’ve definitely avoided promotions and responsibility that would expect me to work long hours. I don’t need the extra money now and certainly don’t need the stress and because we live a pretty frugal life we won’t need the cash in retirement either.
There are also people who prefer working over being at home. I have a lawyer friend who is self employed. His wife complains about all the hours he works, but he works all those hours because otherwise he’d be with her.
Very true for Europe as well.
On the other side, I have a nephew who finished law school, passed the bar exam and got a job in a law firm. When he realized how many hours he was expected to work, he quit and got a job as a paralegal, concealing the fact that he actually holds a law license. He puts in his 40 hours a week and then pursues life.
My experience is in law. And the answer is simple - money and power.
Associates at top private firms work insane hours at the whim of partners. They make pretty good coin as associates, and hope to make considerably more as partners. (I note, tho, that a decade + ago when I was golfing at an exclusive country club w/ and orthodontist friend, he observed that very few of the members were lawyers and doctors, as traditionally was the case. Instead, the greatest number of new members were all “money guys.”
Also, lawyers get considerable influence over other people. That is not of inconsiderable value to a lot of the sorts of folk who go to law school.
Similar to Hari’s nephew, after I had worked for the gov’t for a few years, I had the chance to work in a private firm. Besides the pain of having to deal w/ clients and bill, I simply did not want to put in those hours - especially with a growing family. It wasn’t coincidental that a huge percentage of partners had fucked up families - divorces, affairs, fucked up kids… While I made more annually, on an hourly basis, it wasn’t that much more.
I was thrilled to return to the public sector, and haven’t regretted my decision once. I put in my solid 8 hours a day, was always home for dinner w/ the family, NEVER worked over the weekends, and took every second of vacation given me. And at age 60, I’m plenty healthy and physically fit for whenever I choose to retire (likely in 2-5 years.)
Personally, I’ve never understood the practice of hiring young doctors, lawyers, etc, and working them around the clock. Always struck me much more reasonable to hire 2 people at 1/2 the cost each, and expect them to work hours that support a decent lifestyle…
Sure, you can work around th eclock until you are 40, and then retire. But IMO, being a dad - or mom - is better done as a younger person.
It’s also not uncommon in startup culture to demand that the company basically take over your life. I consulted with startups for a few years and these young, energetic men and women were proud of their 100-hour weeks, often for next to no pay. Some of them had legit dreams of turning their businesses into multi-million dollar paydays; others just loved the challenge and the environment of constantly innovating and changing course on a dime. Many were fresh out of college and trying to establish bona fides to land jobs at more established companies; others had already walked away from that life.
TLDR: Crazy motherfuckers. 
Totally so. Six years ago, when I was job hunting, I looked – briefly – at a job at Facebook. Two of the “benefits” which they proudly talked about were:
Translation: if you work here, you can expect to never be home.
Did the office chairs fully recline?
I wouldn’t be surprised, but by the point I read about the dinner service and the laundry, I knew that I had no interest in working there. 
One group I worked with was based in a single office, maybe 30 ft x 20 ft. It had a kitchenette and a futon. The founder actually slept there 3-4 nights a week. Unfortunately, he had a wife and a two-year-old son, and I found out later she’d finally lost patience and divorced him. The business failed, too.
Medical residents can’t, actually. Since 2003 we’ve had strict rules in place that keep residents from working more than 80 hours in a week. Programs that push those rules are taking a huge risk with their accreditation. Many programs were dragged kicking and screaming into this entirely reasonable limit, but most programs have made peace with it by now.
After residency, when the “real doctor money” comes, a lot of young docs want to work those crazy hours so they can make enough to live like they think a doctor should and also pay off their loans. Docs these days are almost never self-employed, but they’re usually on some kind of a pay-for-production arrangement rather than a straight salary, so working more really does mean getting paid more.
There’s also a lot of pressure from employers, playing on whatever altruistic impulses docs have. They act like any doc who isn’t willing to work well into the night every night–not taking care of emergent problems, just routine things–is lazy and doesn’t want to care about his patients. I had a lot of conflicts over this early in my career and it made it tough sometimes, but I stuck to my guns and I’m better off for it.
“Workaholic” is a cute, made up word, but it still describes a real thing. IANA shrink, but I’ve seen OCD and OCPD manifest in a lot of different ways, and I’m convinced that workaholism is one of them. People like this can’t not work.
I had a supervisor like this once; she was in the office before anyone else in the morning, and the last to leave. She had no life outside of work, so she used to force fake socializing on us from time to time, so she got a little social stimulation (she didn’t require a lot)-- it never occurred to her that we might rather be with our families or friends, because those were foreign concepts to her.
Everyone there liked the job, and felt good about the work we were doing, but that didn’t mean we wanted to do it all of our waking hours, and that didn’t compute with her-- anyone who couldn’t stay late, do something extra at the last minute, pick up a new duty that would “just add a few minutes to your day” (yes, but you’ve said that 11 other times in the last 3 months, and that’s an hour added to my day), had a bad attitude, as far as she was concerned. She simply could not understand why everyone didn’t feel the same way she did about working.
I think people like this pretty commonly get into supervisory positions, you know, because they are there all the time, and they are perceived as good workers, since it never occurs to anyone that there might be something fundamentally wrong with a person whose entire existence is the job. Once they are supervisors, they try to push their weird work beliefs on everyone else, and to an extent, they get away with it, because they’re in charge.
Because investment banks, law firms, consultancies, and tech companies don’t pay uneducated people six figure salaries to work 100 hours a week?
As others pointed out, they (we I suppose) do it for money, power, influence, lifestyle, etc. Working with high powered clients, expensive dinners and lunches, other perks.
Consulting and law are a bit different from finance. Bankers and traders get paid a bonus based on how much revenue they generate. I’ve talked to enough traders to know that most of them aren’t Jaime Dimon bringing home $25 million paydays. But $200k - $300k isn’t uncommon. Consultants and lawyers tend to not get paid those big bonuses. They get paid well, but it’s really more of a grind for 8-12 years to make “partner” before they start earning the big money. And then it’s based on how much revenue they generate.
Also, it’s not like these guys are spending 100 hours a week in the coal mines. Like how does an analyst drop dead from doing too many DCF analysis?
So, why doesn’t he get divorced?
My sister’s BFF never worked in private practice after she graduated from law school; IIRC she worked for a social service agency in their legal department for a while, because they also paid off a lot of her loans, and then she did something similar in her hometown.
She did a Michelle Obama and gave up her license within a few years after graduation, something I’ve heard is not that uncommon.
I also found out recently that a woman I knew in high school (we went to different schools but knew each other through extracurriculars) got a law degree, worked as an attorney for a few years, then took a few years off to raise her kids. When those kids were in school, she went back to school herself and got a second bachelor’s degree (and of course a master’s in the meantime) - in secondary history education, and has been teaching for about 20 years, probably what she really wanted to do to begin with, but she was quite likely under pressure to go to either law or medical school.