I agree. Americans get almost religious if you propose to only work a day per week. Much better to claim that the rest of your week was already fully booked, even though in reality you just don't need the additional money.

> Americans get almost religious if you propose to only work a day per week.

That depends on the American. There is no unified American culture anymore, which makes generalities like this almost universally false. Case in point: I've lived in America all my life and nobody I know would object to only working a day a week if they could actually live off that little money.

Heh, wasn't a 20-hours work week the American ideal of the future?

It was the marketing ploy used to sell consumerism and futurism. The reality turned out that now productivity expectations just got higher, rather than everyone getting more free time.

Work life balance is a priority for most people but the issue is that everyone is only concerned with their own work life balance, rather than society as a whole. These people work themselves to death and trample on others in order to reward themselves with work life balance later on in life. Then you realize that if only everybody helped each other out and stopped trying to compete with each other, we wouldn't be in this situation. Unfortunately this is how life works and is a classic case of Prisoner's Dilemma [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma