People consistently choose more money over increased leisure. So it's not unique to this situation. I think the assumption is that the option for leisure will always be there but the option to make lots of money won't be. This is colloquially known as "get while the getting's good." Though I'm sure there are other reasons as well.
You may also be poorly calibrated on how much money one can use.
Quite possibly. On contemplation, I suspect my original confusion is typical mind fallacy with ugh field - I worked at a place tangentially linked to the City several years ago, and mostly I felt that our customers were, each and every one, prima facie arguments in favour of a particularly bloody socialist revolution. And I hated every second individually. Even though the work itself was pretty close to what I do right now. So yeah, not a good fit.
(I presently work at a small publishing company where things are considerably easier-going. I can also work from home pretty much any day I need to, which is quite a few of them. And the money's good for non-City Unix sysadmin.)
The other day, someone did something I didn't expect. It was something many people have done before; something that I thought of as very normal, but that I in no way understood and had not predicted.
As I said, this had happened many time before, so I wrote it off as "me not understanding people" or "people are weird" for a second, like I usually do, before realizing that "bad at" really means "lacking basic knowledge", which I had never realized before.
And then I thought "I should ask someone who is different from me why people do that, and eventually someone will have an answer."
But many people will have many more questions like this. So, what have you observed people doing time and time again, but never understood? Or something that you only understood after a long time or asking someone about it?
And can Less Wrong tell us, not necessarily why (I for one can make up evolutionary psychology fairy tales all day if I want) but what conscious thought process occurs behind these events?