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DanArmak comments on Why do people ____? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Here's a partial explanation - a contributing element.
Do they have an option for working shorter hours at the same hourly rate? I suspect not (employers will much prefer those willing to put in long hours once the tradition is in place). So people who want to make a lot of money have to work hard now and plan to switch to a lower paid job once they've saved enough. But switching to a lower paid job (or stopping working for profit if you're rich enough) is psychologically unpleasant and culturally discouraged, and people will keep putting it off. Or it may be hard psychologically to live modestly while making a lot of money.
This is effectively why my mother claims to have quit her veterinary practice: she didn't want to keep working 70 hours a week and she couldn't do it as a 9-5 job.
Such situations probably aren't due to a widespread evil "tradition" among employers, but rather due to the fact that a skilled worker's average productivity-per-hour is typically maximized at a high number of hours-per-week. Any medical professional, for instance, needs to spend many hours per week just keeping up with advances in treatment options, changes in regulations, etc, but overhead hours are wasted unless they're amortized over even more hours spent actually administering treatment.
That would be great. The problem - present in some professions - is that productivity per hour drops, but you can still add more hours and get higher total productivity until it drops all the way to zero.
By adding more hours your productivity today may increase while your productivity tomorrow drops, because you didn't have enough sleep, because your neglected relationships are falling apart (and your bad mood affects your productivity at work), etc.
But today, it feels like a net gain.
And tomorrow... well, you will probably have to work overtime to compensate for your decreasing productivity. Also to keep up with your colleagues who are still in their "today" phase.
I agree that sometimes it makes rational sense to work harder than usual. But I also think humans are bad at calculating all the consequences. The work life gives us exact numbers as a feedback, while the personal life mostly gives us only a feeling that something is wrong... until the consequences accumulate and one gets some kind of boolean feedback, such as a divorce or a heart stroke, but by then it's kind of late to make a balance. So I guess most people in these professions err on the side of working more than is optimal for the best cost-to-output ratio. Problem is, when the other people are doing it, standing out of the crowd is usually very bad signalling.
Ooh, I think that's probably a big one. Lawyers get the same.