Quality of life vs. Love of the job

We've all heard the ads on TV recently about work life balance, about how everyone should take time to ensure that their work doesn't overshadow their personal life. For a lot of people this can be a major struggle. The average person gets up early, goes to work, spends the bulk of the day there, and then returns home through another painful commute, to find that there is really only enough time to have dinner, crash out in front of the TV, and go to bed.

Obviously in these cases measures are needed to redress the balance, whether it be working shorter hours, working closer to home, or just structuring your days better to avoid the feeling of living a life that consists of work-bed-work-bed... For most people this is the case and with a little effort it can be done. But what about the people who don't feel any such problem, the people who, instead of having a job, have what can only be termed as a vocation?

Take, for example, programmers. As a group, especially the nerdier of the bunch, we tend to have an almost obsessive desire to learn more about our chosen profession, its no hardship or effort to take some of our vanishingly small amount of personal time to do something work related, because its not just work related, it is, in a very real sense, who we are. The typical nerd/programmer will think nothing of taking the time or effort after work, or on the weekends, to play with some new technology, or language, or just do something that's fun. I recently got it into my head that it would be a great idea to program my LEGO Mindstorms kit using Java, and try to find some way of adapting it to be accessible over the web. This could take days, if not weeks, of work, but it doesn't matter because its part of who I am.

So, in this case does the work life balance matter so much? Or is it in fact a case of the balance being reversed, where the old impression of nerds ("You need to get out more!!") applies? Its a subject that could probably do with some investigating, and more than likely already has, but its still interesting to think about.

Preferably inside, where I can get a good solid WiFi connection ;)