[DATACOMMANDER]

This misses a big part of the picture. People—especially single young men—are ambitious and competitive. Someone with enough skill to be on-call at a modern manufacturing plant—let alone a software engineer—is not just scraping by. He doesn’t submit to long, hard hours because he has no choice; he does so because he wants to advance in his career. He has a real, meaningful choice: sacrifice work/life balance while he’s young in an attempt to maximize his earning power, or coast by comfortably—if frugally—and make roughly $PRESENT_AGE * 1000 (inflation-adjusted) right up until retirement. If you want to talk about sweatshops or sex slavery, sure, I’m right there with you. But let’s not kid ourselves.