Working more than 55 hours a week kills 750k people a year worldwide

I think this is more about manual labour but I'll take the opposite side when it comes to white collar work that working more hours can be better early on in your career.

When I was just out of school and in my early 20s I worked as much as I could, I probably did close to 12 hours days in my 20s.

I think I probably averaged an all nighter a month for a few years and worked at least one day on weekends and I loved every minute of it.

I said yes to almost all the work I could get. My bosses loved me and I got raises/promotions faster than anyone else. I was able to compress 10 years of experience into about half that time. It really set me up for my career later on in life and I learned so much in that time.

I did the learn a language a year thing and that helped me get a job as a compiler writer.

And I was able to leverage that into becoming a quant as I put in the hours to relearn all the math I'd forgotten from school.

And I was able to leverage that to get into a pretty darn successful hedge fund where I said no to them a few times before they convinced me to join.

I'm now in my 40s with a family and I work far less but I still think it was the right move at the time. It really set me up for a life of success and I was able to see the effects of outworking everyone else pay off.

I didn't seem to miss out on a social life and I had no burn out or resentment to speak of from those days.

>We concluded that working long hours is associated with depressive state, anxiety, sleep condition, and coronary heart disease.

https://www.sjweh.fi/download.php?abstract_id=3388&file_nro=...

>The evidence that long working hours are a risk factor for cardiovascular disease is accumulating and suggests a small risk.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11886-018-1049-9

>[...] working long hours is associated with an elevated risk of early cardiovascular death and hospital-treated infections before age 65.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...

You had no burnout or resentment because you had an enjoyable working environment with what sound like just rewards and you were able to learn valuable things. That's pretty rare in my experience.

My anecdotal evidence is the opposite. I worked extra hours and volunteered for a long time. I took responsibility for things nobody else wanted. My raises and bonuses were trivial. I had one promotion early on from entry level to midlevel. Then I was filling the role of a senior dev and a tech lead for a year each with good reviews and respect of other devs in the department (and some outside it). No promotion, still minor raises and bonuses.

Thanks! I'll have to read these. Seems like a lot of those conditions have been correlated with other attributes, such as lower income, etc. I wonder if working longer hours is really just a result of things like money problems causing the stress causing other issues.

While I have no reason to doubt your experience, please note that you're probably an outlier. One of the things I strongly believe that Extreme Programming got right is the max 40 hour work week. Some can easily do more than 40 hours and still function, some can do less but 40 hours seems like a happy average. Expecting more is unreasonable and won't lead to more productivity for most.

That's not to say that those who can should work the hours they'd like and see the benefits, but never expect others to be able to do the same, regardless of age and life situation.