[SXX]

I'll be completely honest: I work at small indie game dev studio with friends. This means we have to crunch for release, work every day and stay at night sometimes. Nobody force me to do it, but it happens. I love this job, but working like that is bad for long-term performance and will inevitable cause burnout.

As others have said you are being overworked by your employeer. It's not only mean they dont care about your health, but also it means their processes are bad exactly because company itself will only lose in the end: quality will drop, productivity will sink and people will leave.

As about working on your own be it freelance or starting your own company: this way you will only have to work much more. So far I haven't seen any single successful entrepreneur or founder who wasn't working 12 hours a day for at least several years before they get anywhere.

[PeterStuer]

Freelance certainly does not have to be 12 hrs a day to be successful.

[SXX]

That's can work once you have established profile and clients for long-term support - true. Before you reach this moment you really have to work a lot on your profile / getting customers.

Also it obviously gonna depend on what is your speciality. I guess some RoR / Java developer will more likely to find long-term contract.