Most posters below conflate or ignore two major aspects in their examples:
1. Physical vs. intellectual work. I had a few almost-sleepless nights over the length of my career, worrying whether my proposed (being implemented) architecture/solution would scale. Long-term mentall stress like this can lead to psychological issues, even depression. I am not saying physical work is a bed of roses, but when you stop working, you don' take your work to bed with you. And when you are physically tired, you actually sleep better.
2. Working for yourself vs. making someone else richer through your (unpaid) sacrifice. Working on a farm is never ending, yes, but you own the farm and all the extra work benefits YOU.
A society where the mean lifetime is 35 that works 20 hours per week gives people significantly less total leisure time than a society where the mean lifetime is 85 that works 50 hours per week.
Or in other words: all those dead infants got no leisure time at all.
The dangerous mindset is that if you're capable of working whenever and wherever you are, then why should you ever really disconnect? This problem is an epidemic with people who don't know how to create a mental separation between work life and everything else, and I would argue that although it's easier to fall in the trap if you work over a VPN, it can also happen for any worker that is permitted/encouraged to work at any time of the day regardless of the situation.
Software development is not a special occupational snowflake, and I'm going to guess that you've never been within the property boundaries of an actual farm, let alone actually done farm work. Your job is interwoven into your live so much because you choose to allow it, and don't know when to say "no" to your boss. Close your laptop. There, work's over. Farm work? Yeah, well, those fences aren't going to mend themselves.
You don't live at the office, do you? Not metaphorically, I mean literally sleep there. No? Guess where the farmer sleeps? At work. Every day. Extrapolate from there.
I do plenty of woodworking, including woodworking with CNC/Software. But, I do know when I'm done with a project because the abstractions are over, the plans are drawn and implemented, and the project is built. Then, its done.
For quite a lot of human history, and still in some countries, farm animals were kept at home. The "done for the day" was enforced as much by the lack of electric lighting as anything else.
I'm unsuccessfully trying to think of any examples. Fine arts painting, maybe?
Same line of thinking WRT military, farming, etc.
On a very small scale I'll never type that specific line of code again, probably.
There are very few ways to earn a living that don't terminate the procedure with "repeat from beginning of procedure"
If you were asking about a job where you do it once and it stays done permanently forever, that's silly, and it's not what the guy you replied to was referring to.
For the vast majority of human history, work has always been something that was interwoven into our lives. From hunting and gathering, to farming and ranching, to woodworking and blacksmithing, and so on, up until the industrial revolution, nearly everyone "worked from home" and I'm unaware of any documented ill health effects from this. Intuitively, I'd suppose that aggregate stress levels actually rose with the advent of commuting to dedicated factory/office workplaces, as factory quotas and office micromanagement are far more psychologically demanding than the farm or home workshop in which you ( or your remote, usually undemanding lord, in the case of feudal work relationships ) set your own schedule and degree of competitiveness.