I don't agree. You start work at 7am and leave work at 7pm. This takes twelve hours from your day. That leaves you twelve hours for: sleeping, eating, hygiene, commuting and personal time. Say you sleep the normal 7.5 hours per day (to keep a sustainable lifestyle) and commute a total of 1.5 hours per day. Now you have three hours left. Personal hygiene takes at least 0.5 hours per day. Even if you eat quickly, and take your breakfast as 'work', this leaves you 30 minutes per day for two meals. Or if you count lunch as work, then you gain an extra half hour. (Two meals a day as 'working meals' sounds pretty awful to me, btw.) Leaving you 1.5 - 2.0 hours per day of personal time. That's one visit to the gym, or the chance to play with your kids and put them to bed. There's no cultural involvement, no chance to work on a hobby or a passion, no reading, television, or film and no chance to see friends during the week at all.
I simply will not work for you if the only luxury that I get is the chance to visit the gym and whatever time at weekends is left after I finish answering what are almost certainly non-urgent emails. There are too many compromises. You'd need to be a fool to find that acceptable; there's simply no point in having the money from the job, because you won't enjoy it. You may enjoy the job for a while, but if you are a salaried employee, then that depends on factors outside of your own control and will change. And it's much harder to regain a pleasant life than it is to keep one.
Of course, if you are a startup founder, then we have a different meaning of sustainable. There are not very many people at all who live a startup-founder lifestyle for more than a couple of years without significant breaks, I believe. And I'm not saying that it is not possible to live like above - I'm saying that I'm good at what I do, and I don't need to, so I won't.
I simply will not work for you if the only luxury that I get is the chance to visit the gym and whatever time at weekends is left after I finish answering what are almost certainly non-urgent emails. There are too many compromises. You'd need to be a fool to find that acceptable; there's simply no point in having the money from the job, because you won't enjoy it. You may enjoy the job for a while, but if you are a salaried employee, then that depends on factors outside of your own control and will change. And it's much harder to regain a pleasant life than it is to keep one.
Of course, if you are a startup founder, then we have a different meaning of sustainable. There are not very many people at all who live a startup-founder lifestyle for more than a couple of years without significant breaks, I believe. And I'm not saying that it is not possible to live like above - I'm saying that I'm good at what I do, and I don't need to, so I won't.