Wealthy workers’ long hours of course don’t mean they have it tougher than poor workers do. While people in low-income professions are less likely to work more than a standard 40-hour week, this can be due to a lack of job opportunities. The overwork of the professional class, meanwhile, does seem like more of a choice. The relationship between a person’s satisfaction with her job and the number of hours she works appears to form a U-shaped curve: One study found that satisfaction dips upon working more than 40 hours, only to rise again after 55 hours. Some of that overwork might be driven by passion. Then again, Corporate Stockholm Syndrome is apparently a thing, so maybe at some point you come under the spell of your corporate captors.

Many of these people are salaried employees, so they’re not earning overtime. Why work more hours than you get paid for? “Employers are greedy institutions. They want as much time as they can get,” Milkie says. This can be especially hard in creative professions, where the sign of a job well done is nebulous and subjective. (“If we all hated our jobs, it would be much easier to create work-life balance,” a worker once told Schulte.) In professional jobs, employees feel a sense of competition with one another. And one way to compete is to outwork.

This culture of overwork has well-known personal consequences. Working more than 55 hours a week raises the risk of heart attack and stroke. People who work longer hours tend to be more anxious and depressed, and their sleep suffers. Long hours aren’t even good for performance: As Schulte wrote in the Harvard Business Review, research has shown that people’s IQ actually drops 13 points when they’re in a state of tunnel-vision busyness.

Long work hours affect romantic relationships, too. In heterosexual partnerships, women seem to suffer more than men do. One study found that women whose male partners worked 50 or more hours a week were more stressed and felt their relationships were of lower quality than those partnered with men who worked 35 to 49 hours. But men partnered with women who worked long hours “report no differences in stress, time adequacy, or relationship quality.”

Technology has been offered up as both a cause of work-life imbalance and a potential solution. Smartphones often take the blame for work bleeding into the evening, yet Butts says certain elements of remote work can actually be beneficial. Attempting to work 60 hours each week directly from an office desk can be brutal. “Being able to attend to after-work emails after the kids go to bed allows you to set up for the next day,” he says. “One of my colleagues calls it ‘parking downhill’”—setting yourself up to have the easiest workday possible. “Without tech, you couldn’t have that.”

Butts says that if you can, you should try to “segment” between your work and nonwork lives. But for jobs in which that’s not possible, he advises that the best way to think about your life is as “one big pie.” Busy people who see work and nonwork as two separate spheres tend to get angry when one bleeds into the other, Butts says. One coping mechanism might be to view your life as a seamless, worky fever dream. As unappealing as that sounds, at least you’re not surprised when it extends past 6 p.m.