Thanks for asking, Sngouela! That's a great, thoughtful question and I like your analysis.

I agree that my article can't necessarily be transferred to different contexts, at least not in its entirety.

What's so baffling about overworked rich Americans is that they don't have to overwork. For them, work is becoming a status symbol.

That's very different from someone working to give the next generation a chance they never had.

Even in rich countries (including the USA), I know of people who come from disadvantaged backgrounds and worked really hard to give the next generation a better chance.

When I talk to older people who have done that, I often get the sense that they wish they had taken work a little bit less seriously. They are glad that their efforts helped them get to such a good place in life (which also benefits future generation) but they can also see how much it has cost them.

In retrospective, they generally think that most of their efforts were necessary. Many also think that once they made it to a certain level of economic safety, they should have relaxed a bit about work and paid more attention to other areas of life (which is hard to do when you've been so focused on working towards a better situation for so long).

For people who never get to a base level of economic safety because of how the cards are stacked against them, that's obviously a different story and that relaxation after a long climb might never come.

Did that answer your question?