You manager wants you to agree to the work they ask you to perform, and they want to load you up with work to maximize your efficiency. How one negotiates when you're reaching capacity is professional communications. If one is unable to attain work/life balance that is due to a lack of communication skills, the lack of the ability to explain you're past ordinary capacity, burning your health. Our industry is over run with members over working - that's due to their inability to communicate the are over capacity.

My current manager asks me to define the work, and has asked me not to do certain things because he feared it would overload me. He values professional communication and endorses people who want to improve them, going so far as to allocate work time and support them financially in their efforts to learn.

I’ve also been a manager at 3 different companies, one of them my own, and my philosophy has not been to push deadlines or work, but to spend more time understanding requirements, and simply try to break down long-running projects into small pieces that can be estimated more accurately. One of the biggest problems I’ve witnessed in software is that estimates in units of years are always very wrong, while estimates in units of days or weeks are pretty good.

I have to agree with the parent; you’re making incorrect assumptions and maybe projecting your own bad experience, and ending up accidentally saying something that isn’t true.

They're not wrong. Our industry has a burnout problem. Some places are nicer than others to work at, but that doesn't mean the industry as a whole doesn't have problems.