"Working long hours being single helps because your time is yours. Once you have a family your time isn't all yours anymore. Most of the Mac team, we were in our mid-20's, most of us were single, and we were able to essentially devote our lives to it"
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The romance of the early Mac era has a cost baked into its origin story: it was built by people young enough, and unattached enough, to let a project colonize their entire lives. Hertzfeld isn’t bragging so much as stating the quiet prerequisite behind a certain kind of “breakthrough” mythology. When he says being single “helps,” he’s naming an uncomfortable truth about tech’s favorite narrative of genius: it often runs on borrowed time - time not yet claimed by children, partners, aging parents, or even a more balanced sense of self.
The line also does something sly. It reframes overwork as freedom rather than extraction. “Your time is yours” makes the 80-hour week sound like a privilege, not a management strategy. That’s how a culture normalizes intensity: by casting it as voluntary devotion, a heroic choice made by true believers. The subtext is that commitment to craft is measured in hours, and the people who can donate those hours most easily are the people with fewer outside obligations - typically the young, typically men, typically insulated from caregiving.
Context matters here: late-70s/early-80s Silicon Valley was inventing not just machines but a work religion, one that treated deadlines like destiny and personal sacrifice as proof of seriousness. Hertzfeld’s memory is candid, even tender, but it accidentally underlines the exclusionary math of innovation. If the doorway to building the future is “devote our lives to it,” then the future will disproportionately be built by those who can afford to surrender a life.
The line also does something sly. It reframes overwork as freedom rather than extraction. “Your time is yours” makes the 80-hour week sound like a privilege, not a management strategy. That’s how a culture normalizes intensity: by casting it as voluntary devotion, a heroic choice made by true believers. The subtext is that commitment to craft is measured in hours, and the people who can donate those hours most easily are the people with fewer outside obligations - typically the young, typically men, typically insulated from caregiving.
Context matters here: late-70s/early-80s Silicon Valley was inventing not just machines but a work religion, one that treated deadlines like destiny and personal sacrifice as proof of seriousness. Hertzfeld’s memory is candid, even tender, but it accidentally underlines the exclusionary math of innovation. If the doorway to building the future is “devote our lives to it,” then the future will disproportionately be built by those who can afford to surrender a life.
Quote Details
| Topic | Work-Life Balance |
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