>"only superhumans who work 80 hour weeks can accomplish great things" is not the kind of effect I want on society. We have enough of that as it is. We need less of it, not more.
I don't think you know what you're talking about here. Let me explain why 80 hours a week is a good thing.
At large, people lead lives of quiet struggle against forces they do not understand. They continue this because they are in a local minimum of daily energy expenditure, and like simulated anealling, you stay stuck unless you keep putting in more energy. Women return to husbands that beat them because that's their local minimum, even though they have the option of returning to the dating pool, moving out, creating a new social circle: These tasks are putting energy into their lives so that they might arrive at a new minimum with a value much lower than the previous minimum. You could say that they are better off for it, thanks to the energy put in.
She puts in more energy, then she ends up closer to the global minimum.
This can be applied to society. If people are relaxed as they are today, they are probably in a local minimum and not the global minimum. But in some form, analogously, the wife beating continues, and we simply rationalize it like you have shown here, and we continue.
I am 22. I assume you're in your 30s/40s. We have no future, my friend, and it's thanks to collective 'shrugging it off' decade after decade since WW2. I won't accept that, and you should not either. You are making up silly excuses to protect yourself from the truth which is 'Wow, America really does need this man, and he truly is doing great things'.