Can you explain what you mean by your last paragraph? The inability to find meaning and indentity in ones work causes people a psychic crisis to leave their jobs even temporarily? That problem is an imagined hurt to the economy?
Typically an American's sole sense of identity comes from his or her job, and while we give lip service to 'happiness' as our life's goal unless happiness means ambition and success in one's work, you are an oddball.
The problem isn't that Americans are hurting the economy with over work; the problem, if you want to call it one, is that because we have nothing else in our lives, we don't mind that we're overworked.
People say they like their work and they "live" for their work because it's all they have, yet they aren't happy with it. If they were, they wouldn't be so compelled to go out and drink weekends away.
Americans have no choice but to be overworked. I look at professional jobs where I could use my computer science degree, and I have no choice. I basically have to choose a job where I work more than 40 hours a week. And in the US, a lot of employers only pay you for when you work. So that hour lunch break doesn't count toward the time you're working. Neither does your commute.
So there's a large swath of people in the US who work 10 hours a day, have an hour of two of commute each way, and an hour of idle time at work. meaning worst case scenarios, you're looking at 13+ hours a day spent at doing work related things.
Something that people have to do that consumes their life will be perceived as something that that person likes, kind of like how Stockholm Syndrome works.
No one ever speaks of how these long hours affect Americans to the point where they don't have time for constructive hobbies, time to learn about the world, etc, and that is going to hurt Americans far more than anything else.
I realize that their is more distance for Americans to see the world than Europeans or Asians, however, you would think that if seeing the world was considered important, that Americans would have more time off and more paid vacation to make up for the fact that you need to travel so far to experience vastly different cultures.
You've got to think about the fact that we have a generation of people raising children who only know how to work while the rest of the developed world is taking long vacations and living in the assumption that a worker should have access to health care, education, etc.
I am terrified of how the next generation of Americans will turn out. They're going to grow up seeing both their parents work 50 hour work weeks, have no hobbies, never travel to anything inspiring and only travelling for escapism, and thinking that they have it better in the USA than anywhere else.
I don't plan on having children in the USA. I don't think I could morally raise a child and fill their heads with delusions of grandeur and getting rich quick by working 65 hours a week, only to see them swallowed by student loans and debt, never escaping that mortgage until they die, while I look them in the eye and tell them the people in France work half as much yet make more money.
Please, look at these numbers: http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=LEVEL#
I realize they are a bit dated (the new dataset doesn't include the metric I want to look at), but USA already works harder than the Japanese. USA works almost 30% more hours than Netherlands. That's massive. To put that into perspective, that means an 8 hour workday in the USA translates into a 5.6 hour work day in the Netherlands.