Rationalistic people work to live instead of intentionally living to just work by setting their lives up to revolve around nothing but a career--they will certainly not make work the basis of their worldview or pretend like anything other than logical axioms are the heart of all things, but they might only bother with work at all out of the need for money to obtain other things they need or desire. Even for people who are not irrational enough to structure their lives this way on purpose, desperation can make it seem appealing to some people as a hopeful escape from the constancy and difficulty of poverty. All the same, even structuring one's life around work does not typically help people better their lives overall.
They might wake up exhausted from the work of the previous days or weeks, only to devote most of their time or energy for the day to more work, and then they come home just as tired or even more so, needing to repeat the rigid cycle until the arrival of the weekend. Even the weekend is not always a respite. Not only is more work looming ahead in a couple of days at most, and some do not even have their weekends completely free, but emergencies or errands might consume the relatively little free time the weekend is supposed to offer. More substantial things like savoring ones worldview, friendships, mental health, or hobbies
Of course a person can and needs to psychologically prioritize at least all of these besides hobbies over professional work just to even be a rational person whether or not their workload is enormous--and they can be understood and appreciated even by hyper-busy people (especially strictly logical truths that underpin all things, which are accessible in any place or time). It is not as if there is any excuse for going years without either discovering or revisiting/celebrating these truths. However, there might be people who would eagerly throw themselves into relentless work out of boredom or to escape family members or to earn as much money and prestige as they can, but they are for the most part either desperate or stupid, in dire need of more money or irrational enough, if applicable, to think that the social construct of professional business is the heart of human life or the whole of reality, or at least the most important part of it.
Whether or not a person has the desperation or irrationality to blindly accept the standard work cycle, the often inflexible work cycle of American will not even have the same impact on all individuals. It is possible for someone to be energized or feel empowered by their professional job and for someone else holding the same job to be psychologically and physically drained, with work vampirically diminishing the rest of their lives even as it provides the income necessary to actually do many things outside of work. The increasing monetization or price increases of everyday things is in part what makes work so often a necessity to participate in society despite its objective intrusion into some parts of life.
Although inconvenient tasks of various kinds are an ongoing part of many people's daily lives, professional work is but a small part of human existence, and one of the least important aspects of it at that. If it was not for the initial difficulty or unfamiliar nature of growing one's own food, storing one's own water, and arranging one's own shelter with or without the wonders of electricity and other advanced technology, perhaps more people would simply remove themselves from the current state of the American workplace. Unfortunately, even those who would gladly switch to such a lifestyle could quickly find that even here, already having money at the outset is a major help in getting started. Who, for instance, could easily obtain the land needed to grow food without some degree of preexisting wealth on someone's part? Money itself is not the problem, and professional work itself does not have to be incentivized or forced upon people in all the ways it currently is. It is the typical tendency for workers and employers to try to make work occupy most of their time that hurts almost everyone even if they do not want to realize it.
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