A big problem, bigger than this even, is that we don't know what a post-industrial economy looks like yet. We don't have all the norms ironed out, and we haven't come to grips with the fact that it'll look different (in basically every way) than an industrial economy. So many of our assumptions are rooted in 19th and 20th century ideas of what day to day work should look like, most of which is based of factory work and routine work. And that's where the 40 hour work week comes from, as well as the 9-5 schedule. Factories have shifts, 9-5 is just the most normal one, 40 hours a week is 1/3 of all weekday hours, it's fairly simple. These norms were designed to fit humans into the system of machinery, to figure out a way they could service the machines 24/7. They've been brought down to reasonable(ish) terms based on decades of work to improve working conditions, but they're still fundamentally norms based on factory work.
Creative work, knowledge work, development, etc, are very much different kinds of work, and they tend to be done in a different way. They don't have the same requirements of factory work (no need for shifts to man machines 24/7 except in a few cases). And they don't take a personal toll the same way. Lots of people fall into the trap of thinking that sitting in an air conditioned office necessarily makes a job easy, even "cushy", compared to physical labor, but that's an archaic notion. The impositions of cognitive labor can be just as severe as physical labor. Stress and bad working conditions in cognitive work can lead to health problems, emotional problems, and shorter lifespans just as easily as physical work can. Stress, psychological abuse, oppression, emotional crisis, all of these things are potentially as life threatening and traumatic as black lung or broken limbs. But whereas we've spent decades and trillions of dollars setting standards for the physical well being of workers in manual labor conditions we have only scratched the surface, with mixed results, when it comes to cognitive well-being.
On the one hand, hours are somewhat tangential to those factors, but on the other hand, when there are conditions which are detrimental to cognitive well-being being the number of hours that must be spent at work often significantly increases the problem. There are many jobs that are tolerable even when they are at 60+ hours a week, and there are other jobs that are intolerable even at 20 hours a week.
Creative work, knowledge work, development, etc, are very much different kinds of work, and they tend to be done in a different way. They don't have the same requirements of factory work (no need for shifts to man machines 24/7 except in a few cases). And they don't take a personal toll the same way. Lots of people fall into the trap of thinking that sitting in an air conditioned office necessarily makes a job easy, even "cushy", compared to physical labor, but that's an archaic notion. The impositions of cognitive labor can be just as severe as physical labor. Stress and bad working conditions in cognitive work can lead to health problems, emotional problems, and shorter lifespans just as easily as physical work can. Stress, psychological abuse, oppression, emotional crisis, all of these things are potentially as life threatening and traumatic as black lung or broken limbs. But whereas we've spent decades and trillions of dollars setting standards for the physical well being of workers in manual labor conditions we have only scratched the surface, with mixed results, when it comes to cognitive well-being.
On the one hand, hours are somewhat tangential to those factors, but on the other hand, when there are conditions which are detrimental to cognitive well-being being the number of hours that must be spent at work often significantly increases the problem. There are many jobs that are tolerable even when they are at 60+ hours a week, and there are other jobs that are intolerable even at 20 hours a week.