You're not wrong. But there's another aspect to it, which I experienced in my (never missed) days in elite corporate law — yucky term, I know, but that's how these places think of themselves. Everyone was very busy — the hours were routinely insane — and we all worked ourselves up into a stupor, but after whatever the task was was done, there was a slightly empty sense of — what have we actually achieved? It's a weird sort of hyper-productivity loop where everything sort of just stays the same, somehow.