Says Edward, in his final analysis on the relationship between work and life: "But when the whistle blows, and that dinosaur's tail comes down, it's time to leave work behind and relax. It's my life, after all."

Look, if your life starts at five PM, then maybe you need to re-evaluate your life. Me, I'm not about to waste a single hour of the time I have in this world--it's short enough already. I don't hang out with boring people, I don't watch Fox News, and I sure as hell don't spend eight hours a day doing something unless it makes me happy.

That's the point. You shouldn't spend your life doing something that's "tolerable". In my last job, I worked from nine to six each day. Liked the work all right. Had lots of time for going out with friends, dinners, the works. Sometime around the two-month mark, I woke up one Thursday and thought "I don't want to go to work." I quit the next day.

In my current job, I often work fourteen-hour days. But I'm happy. It's not because I'm friends with the people I work with--although that helps--it's because I'm doing what I'm good at for a purpose I believe in. Ultimately, all the foosball tables in the world won't make up for a job you don't care about.

If for you, happiness is just drinks and friends and movies, then you won't understand my point. Yes, there are people who work like hell to earn more money so they can buy more drinks, impress more friends, and see more movies. That's not what I'm talking about. Then there are people whose jobs are easy, and they spend their days surfing the internet or chatting with co-workers. That's also not what I'm talking about. Martin Sigelman of UPenn talks about three kinds of happiness. There's the traditional American surface-level happiness of laughter and beaches--Edward, this is your post-5pm "relaxation." There's the happiness of doing something you're good at, be it writing or arguing or surgery. And finally, there's the happiness of knowing that you're contributing to something you believe in, be it teaching or parenting or politics. When you're great at what you do and you're doing it for something great, you won't need to build walls between the different parts of your life. It'll all be part of the same story.

Oh, one more thing--in your concluding paragraph, you pull a George Bush and present an argument based an anecdotes and not much else. So instead of rebutting it by telling you that my current COO is a workaholic social imbecile (true!) I will tell you that the average CEO works an 11-hour day. But hey, who knows, perhaps you're right about the "social butterfly" factor (although Bill Gates dosn't really seem like such a charmer to me)--but if you're going to make the argument, be willing to do the research to back it up.