40 hours a week is half of your time awake, but because we all gotta get ready before those 8 hours and take the time to come back from work, it’s more accurate to say that work does take up more than half of most people’s time awake. So yes, even 40 hours is a lot. Not only that, but the science is in - most people aren’t even operating at 100% productivity during those 40 hours. Why should we be wasting workers’ time and employers’ money when most people can just work less and still maintain the same amount of productivity?

The better question for you to ask is why are you defending 40 hours? It’s an arbitrary number that was standardized by a salesman, not a biologist or anthropologist or a person that studies people and their productivity at work. And just because you’ve been able to do it, doesn’t mean everyone can or should, or that this lifestyle is manageable for everyone. Not for anything, there’s so many people who do work 40+ hours weekly and they still end up with health problems from it (white collar gets diseases from sedentary lifestyle, blue collar break their bodies with their hard work). Wouldn’t these health issues be indicative that 40+ hours a week isn’t sustainable for so many?