I often think of another NYT article in a similar vein, where they profiled people in the Bay Area whose net worth was in the ~$10m range.
This is an enormous amount of money and you'd think nobody would stick at a job they didn't like once they were at this point. As I recall in the article, the people in this situation kept thinking "I just need a little bit more" to enable some important next step on the luxury ladder, like horse lessons for their children.
I found this chilling especially because as a person who is wealthy but not that wealthy (note that if you make $40k/yr you're in the top 1% of humans already) I could see myself making similar sorts of rationalizations, not about luxury specifically but more around whether I have enough.
I encountered this attitude a lot in the Bay Area for the ~15 years I lived there and it was one of the reasons I recently left -- I worried my son would grow up around it and think that it was somehow normal behavior.