You need to change, if you was to be a manager you probably inflict pain on others.

Everyone has their own rhythm and that rhythm should be dictated by the weakest link in the chain not the strongest, else people start shooting others, committing suicide or giving up.

No matter how much you work, outsourced work will always win, with the salary any one makes in a developed country they can hire 10 guys to do the same job and they don’t need to work as hard they actually don’t work that hard, those things you see on TV are propaganda, if you visit the factories and offices you will see something different, unless you are in Germany or Japan the 2 most hard working people I have ever seen, I don’t think that there is anybody in the world more hard working and still, they all get outsourced too, is not about how hard you work, but how you work and for how much, ten people working the same job of 3 others for the same amount of money will always produce more no matter how much you try hard.

Raise should be in living quality not in salary, at some point economic growth stalls and goes down, it can’t grow forever that would mean our extinction just like yeast kill itself in the process of expanding their numbers.

That is why I love open source it keeps things local with a global brain, everybody contributes and everybody use that locally to make a living, the other part of the puzzle is how to make a living without using much money, the important part is having everybody working and creating wealth, work is all that matters, not the salary, the money doesn’t create wealth it enables wealth because it makes people work and produce goods and services, but it has downsides that were never addressed.

Also once you are out of the office you should stay incommunicable with work, not because you don’t care but because if you are anything like me, it will consume every living part of your life, there needs to be limits and a growing number of people have noticed that we may have reached the apex of the working frenzy, there are just so many hours in a day and so much one can do and learn to trust others and let them deal with the situations that arise, yes this makes you vulnerable to what others may think of you, that is why mandated hard lines are not a bad idea.

Being a workaholic is sort of like being an adrenalin junkie – some people thrive on it others die from it.

I have personally worked 90 hour weeks and enjoyed it; I have also worked 90 hour weeks and nearly been killed because of the complete exhaustion it caused. For me a major factor was the type of challenge and the variety of work involved. The point is that individual situations create different results.

In your case you enjoy the challenge and responsibility of taking your work with you. Other people – especially those with less challenging jobs – simply become burned out when they do that. In my case I always like to take my career home with me, but not necessarily my job. Then again I am able to distinguish between important and unimportant work, and I am willing to tell my employer to shove it if I feel my dedication is being abused.

The question isn’t simply what our personal experience indicates, but what is best for the majority of workers. That is something I suspect will vary greatly from company to company and from job type to job type.

Aside from all that I agree, anyone who just wants to put in a basic 40 hour week also shouldn’t complain when they get passed by for promotion or pay raises. Especially if they also refuse to take their career home with them (a pet peeve of mine is people who insist on learning only the barest minimum needed to complete their day-to-day job – come on, I understand not wanting to take the companies overload of unfinished work home with you but the career is yours!).