Comment by nugget

In my experience extreme workaholism can often be a way to avoid or defer major life decisions that someone doesn't want to make or even consciously recognize. High status careers are often structured, full of positive feedback loops, and well compensated, all of which can strengthen the urge to defer existential questions about meaning, purpose, community, and identity until some unspecified future date, even (perhaps especially) in highly rational or analytical thinkers. Eventually the debt comes due but sometimes not until many decades later.