Diving into the nuance of "self-imposed crunch"

gamedeveloper.com:

According to our State of the Game Industry 2023 report (a joint effort between GD and GDC this year), about three quarters of game developers noted self-pressure as a reason they worked more than 40 hours per week.

It’s by far and away the most common answer to the survey question “What were the major factors that caused you to work more than 40 hours per week?” with 36 percent of devs noting they don’t consider their 40+ hour weeks excessive. 14% mentioned feeling direct pressure from management, and 11 percent from their peers (“everyone else was working those hours”).

Many workplaces—in the game industry or out—enforce terrible practices and inhibit employees from having anything resembling healthy work/life balance, which is obviously not okay, and those places should be called out. Those folks, in the 14 percent who said management pressured them, and the 11% who noted peer pressure for their hours over 40, deserve better from their higher-ups (it’s on management to keep peer pressure from mounting as well).

But we need to talk about this 74 percent phenomenon.

I feel this myself, as a person with a couple of part time jobs (and my own creative practice) outside of my main gig here. The need to hustle is real, fueled by a complex blend of anxiety (“if I’m not the best, I’ll be letting people down” and/or “I’ll be fired and out on the street”), American/Puritan value mythology about “hard work,” millennial guilt (“my parents had it much harder than me, I need to work for this”) and, somewhere in there, I think, a genuine desire to make amazing things.

All of these things (and more, for many of us) combine and make some folks feel like no matter how hard we work, it’s never enough and will never be enough, and that