I love my work, and doing something 80-90 hours a week that I love hardly seems like a problem. :-) I work 7 days a week, so it works out to around 12 hours a day. That gives me 4 hours of 'other' time if I sleep 8 hours a night.
My point is that unless we come up with some concrete definition of what "work" is, it's rather pointless to talk about its effects. A weight lifter might refer to 'work' as exercising. A truck driver might refer to 'work' as driving a truck. Those two forms of 'work' have a much different affect on your health.
>> Why are some people always suspicious of others who work a lot ?
Sometimes it's bragging. Sometimes it's somewhat delusional. A lot of folks who say they work that long don't really.
To be forced to do that much is awful, to do it voluntarily is probably obsessive.
We absolutely do not want that to become 'normal' or accepted. As others have mentioned, our forebears fought very hard to get the right to a family life, the right to time away from the grind. We shouldn't give it up so easily.
Working 16+ hour days is not sustainable in the long term and is counter productive. Usually when people say they work "80-90 hours a week" I take it with a grain of salt.
Working 80-90 hours a week remotely with the freedom to work from an environment that you find relaxing is a lot different than working 80-90 hours a week in an office or dealing every day with the stresses of traffic and commuting. Yesterday I was laying in a hammock feeling the breeze come in off the lake and listening to the birds while working on my laptop. I couldn't work 80-90 hours a week if I didn't have the ability to look up from my laptop and instantly feel relaxed.
It's something that one can do at certain times in one's life, in certain circumstances. There was a period in my life when I worked eight hours in the office, commuted nearly an hour each way, had dinner, worked another four hours at home and did this for months on end.
Not 80 hours but about 60 which in my opinion is still far too much in the long run.
It was worth it for the results but I wouldn't, and quite possibly couldn't, do it now thirty years later.
So it's not necessarily a problem unless it becomes an uncontrollable obsession or is forced on one.
I think he might be counting his exercise time in that and working 7 days a week. 11 hour work day with a total of 2-4 hours of breaks interspersed sounds about OK.